


Albion and the Woodsman

by Glenmore



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Babies, Depression, Drug Use, Family, M/M, Parentlock, walking around the world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-13 19:39:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 50
Words: 54,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9139246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glenmore/pseuds/Glenmore
Summary: Post Series 3. Sherlock and John are devastated after Mary Morstan makes her final moves. Sherlock relapses at the crack house, John walks around the world ...and a lot happens in between. Parentlock, in the good way.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in 2014, deleted in 2015 and restored today so anyone who takes part in Fandomtrumpshate can make an informed decision when they bid.

The last time I saw John Watson, he told me that he was sick of every last thing and was going to walk around the world. 

“Everything, John?” 

“Everything, Sherlock. I’m sick of my life, I’m sick of the clinic, I’m sick of criminals, I’m sick of people. I’m sick of all the other things I can’t remember that I’m sick of too, so don’t think that because I left I something out, I’m not sick of it. I am and I’m leaving.” 

“I love you,” was all I could think to tell him. 

He stood there next to me in the hospital foyer where he had just watched me being discharged. I had been hospitalized because John Watson’s wife shot me again, just before she was arrested. 

It was becoming apparent that she really doesn’t like me. 

John was sneaking me out of hospital, we supposed, without Mycroft’s knowledge but it is likely he hovered over us anyway like the dangerous all-seeing spider that he is. I thought now was a good time to tell John Watson that I loved him. 

He looked at me with great tenderness and sadness. 

“I can’t hear that right now, Sherlock.” 

I attempted to remonstrate but he raised his strong square hand and turned his wincing face slightly to the left, as if he had just been offered poison. “I don’t want to hear that from you. I can’t hear it. I’m going to walk around the world. I hope you get better.”

And just like that he walked away, leaving me holding a discharge sheet and a bottle of codeine in one hand, my stitched abdominal cavity in the other. 

He didn’t explicitly say he was sick of me too, but since he said “sick of everything”, and didn’t specifically eliminate me, I had to assume he was sick of me too. Which was intensely painful.

I took a taxi home.


	2. Chapter 2

To be fair, John Watson has withstood more in the last couple of years than most people withstand in a life time. John is drawn to the flame of danger like the proverbial moth and certainly in the years I have known him has had his handsome wings singed more than once. 

Observe: 

He went to war and someone shot him and killed his friends. He came home and couldn’t sleep. He met me and we ran riot together and drank a lot of tea. Then I faked my death. (I should have thought that through more carefully, in retrospect. It ruined a lot of things for us.) While I was dead he met a cheerful dull woman and when I came back he married her. His wife has turned out out to be a paid assassin. He forgave her for that, and then they had a daughter who, it turned out, belonged to her defacto partner who no one knew about. Like her other two kids did.

This was discovered after she was tracked down by Interpol, who sought her arrest for twenty four murders on behalf of three separate governments. 

Conclusion: John Watson had endured a lot. 

Half-a-wife Watson is one of the most patient men I know. He has forgiven his treacherous wife a wide range of transgressions, including lying about everything about her life pre-Watson, shooting me, two affairs and losing her wedding ring on a rifle range. Lesser men would have walked away long ago. 

He didn’t, mostly because he was hopelessly in love with (who he thought was) his little girl. Now that she has been swept away by a battery of social workers and seven family members (including her biological father) with bonafide legal and genetic claims on her, John Watson’s heart has been reduced to ash. 

I deduced that his world-wide trek had nothing to do with being sick of everything and everything to do with sickness from losing an adored child who he never really actually had. 

Which is also intensely painful.


	3. Chapter 3

My flat, when I hobbled home from hospital that day, looked like nothing ever happened to the person who lived there. Every thing was clean, no dust settled on any surface, no mail piled up on the table, no random grime on the rugs. A couple of dishes sat in the dish rack, rinsed and perfectly dry. 

I tried to call John Watson to tell him I loved him, or at least leave a message, but the number had been disconnected. Then I checked his blog only to find it had been taken down. 

 

My desperate outburst at the hospital was not the first time I told John I loved him. I told him once after he left his wife (and came straight to me and slept in my bed), twice after I was shot and once when I came to after the first operation and saw him sitting there, reading a copy of Hello magazine with a slightly confused face. 

I can’t remember if he was confused before I said I love him after my first operation, in which case the magazine must have been upsetting him, or after, in which case it was more likely me who confused him. 

It actually doesn’t matter. I just love him, and it turns out I have for years, but Three (soon to be six) Continents Watson has no capacity to deal with my love. 

I have to keep that in perspective: he forgave his wife for lying about her name, shooting me the first time, her past, mostly everything, but can’t hear me telling him that I love him. 

That is intensely painful too.


	4. Chapter 4

If there is any one thing more dull than undergoing surgery, it is recovering from surgery. People are supposed to REST when they have had surgery. It makes sense in theory but I find I actually get worse when I REST. 

And this time, I not only had the notion of RESTING to contend with, but I had to own and process the fact that I loved John Watson and he couldn’t hear me say that. 

It made more sense not to deal with either. I waited until I could walk with relative ease and made my way to an especially intriguing house in Haggerston. 

There I could get high as much as I liked, and to what ever extent I liked. I took full advantage of those exciting opportunities. 

Regrettably I am unable to describe exactly what I was doing there for three weeks, obviously because I was tripping balls. I do know I shared a foul smelling mattress a lot of the time with a girl called Adrienne and and she, at one stage, offered to remove my stitches for me with a nail file. As far as I remember, she didn’t. I remember also that she smelt a little like damp hessian, aluminium foil and Yardley’s English Lavender. 

I’m not able to tell you much more about Adrienne except that she had straight brown hair, six tattoos, four piercings in her left ear and three in the right ear, an accent from Northumberland (rural, not urban) and we had apparently had sex of some kind at least three times. 

I know that because 

a) two other people also getting high in the same house saw us doing that, and

b) when the hospital did the blood tests, DNA results showed irrefutably that Albion was my son.


	5. Chapter 5

The first time Mycroft saved me I had just turned two. We were visiting some terminally dull relatives in Greece and who owned an unnecessarily big house outfitted with a tennis court, orange trees and a pool. I still can’t fathom what they needed those things for. They lived on a part of the the coast that looked over an impossibly beautiful expanse of ocean. That should have been enough. 

I had wandered off from whatever dreary gathering was being conducted and made my way to the pool, where I was certain there would be frogs. Obviously I was an idiot infant because I had yet to take into account the use of commercial chlorine and the effect of chlorine on frogs. 

There were, unsurprisingly, no frogs but I leant over to get a thorough look (early evidence of an aptitude for eliminating all that is impossible), overbalanced and sunk straight to the bottom. 

Magazines like the Reader’s Digest occasionally run stories making pointless claims that babies and toddlers find drowning quite pleasant because they don’t struggle. I have tried frequently to go back in my mind palace to see if that is true but with no luck. All I can recover is the colour of the water as I stood on the edge of the pool, and that there were no frogs. 

I would have drowned – which I sometimes think might have saved a lot of people much heartache, inconvenience and/or dullness - but for the nine year old warrior that was Mycroft, who saw me fall in and jumped, fully dressed, to haul me from the bottom. 

Someone then jumped in to save both of us, because Mycroft was not a particularly good swimmer. He did get my head above water, though. 

That cemented a pattern for us both – I end up in deep water, looking for metaphorical frogs, and Mycroft saves me. We’ve been doing it now for thirty six years. It’s what we do. 

The first time Mycroft didn’t save me was when the drug house in Haggerson was raided and I was arrested. Certainly he came to bail me out, but he was too late because the wound was infected and I had collapsed in the cell. 

He did visit me at the hospital.

“You’re rapidly trying my patience, Sherlock,” he said with barely contained loathing. 

I was in agony. The wound was being drained, I was being given huge doses of antibiotics that were making me nauseous but I was being treated on the hospital’s Drug Addict Pain Management guidelines, which mean analgesics every six hours and nothing more. I was probably withdrawing somewhat too. 

“Can you get them to give me some morphine?” 

“Don’t be ridiculous. You were arrested in a crack house. You’re lucky to be getting some aspirin.” 

“It hurts.” 

“Well, if you stayed in hospital as the doctors recommended and rested as you were instructed, you’d be completely recovered now.” 

He misunderstood. I didn’t mean the wound, because obviously that hurt. I meant John. John – that is, his complete absence, hurt. There was no time to argue though because I needed to throw up. 

I threw up on and off for twelve hours. In the end I was just making the noises because there was not a scrape of anything in my stomach to bring up. Even my bile duct had got bored with the constant upheaval and stopped producing anything to be expelled. I was vomiting air. 

It took eight days for the wound to heal, and another three days before I could walk properly again. As soon as the doctors said I was on the road to a good recovery, Mycroft had me collected and taken to yet another private hospital with a rehabilitation facility. 

It even had a pool.


	6. Chapter 6

Many of the most ardent and valiantly fought arguments I have had with health professionals and layman alike have been about psychology. I need to point out now that I am a huge advocate of psychology and admire many psychologists (Melanie Klein comes to mind because I have been reading a lot of her work recently, but there are many others who have also made important contributions to our understanding of our minds and behaviour). 

I am, however, very opposed to a one-size-fits-all practice of psychology and believe that this is precisely what is offered by a lot of clinics. Three Years Active Service Watson suffered enormously from poor treatment like this. He had a psychosomatic limp, for God’s sake, and no one had worked out why, or even tried to assist him with it. By way of treatment they gave him a cane and had him write a blog. 

And people wonder why I get angry. 

So I wasn’t very hopeful when I was sent off to be rehabilitated again, although I am partial to swimming and looked forward to an occasional dip.


	7. Chapter 7

There was a time, when I first returned to London after faking my death for two years, that John Watson couldn’t see me without punching me. (Did I deserve to punched? In retrospect, yes. I should have taken him with me when I died. Or at least sent him a letter.)

I was starting to think that if I wanted to restore our friendship to its former glory, I would simply have to schedule in a period for physical assault every time we met. 

That actually says a lot more about John than it does about me, but I’ll explain that later. 

I expected therapy at the latest place to be similar, and that they would release me (or let me have a swim) when they had similarly flogged me into replicating an acceptable form of behaviour. 

Instead I was put in the care of a rather sweet doctor called Eddie. He was married, had two children (both of whom were active participants in competitive sports at their rather small public schools), brought his own lunch to work every day, spoke Italian quite fluently, enjoyed easy listening rock on his iPod, drove a four wheel drive and despite being qualified to practice medicine, specialised in mental health care because he was squeamish at the sight of blood. 

Eddie disagreed entirely that I was high functioning sociopath and insisted that all I had to do was work out how to love people and I’d be fine. Relatively. 

Easy for him to say. 

“I think you just tell people you’re a high functioning sociopath because it helps you deal with any disappointment or dislike you think your actions make them feel.”

I didn’t have to even think about that. “Nope.”

“Well, perhaps you tell people you’re a high functioning sociopath because you’re actually an extremely emotional man, and terrified of displaying what you perceive as a vulnerability or even weakness when you’re affected by a person’s love.” 

I had to think about for a few moments. I wasn’t sure what to respond because I couldn’t decide if it was correct or ludicrous. 

“I’m not sure.” 

“Well. Perhaps you tell people you’re a high functioning sociopath because you’re terrified that people won’t love you.” 

It was making me confused. Now that I was being pressed for a reason, I was unable to confirm exactly why I describe myself as a high functioning sociopath. No one had ever asked me about it before. I’d never considered whether I was terrified of not being loved. I couldn’t rule it out. 

But my fears and sociopathy (or lack thereof) weren’t my most pressing problem at that time. 

“It doesn’t matter whether or not I’m a high functioning sociopath, or why. I’m in love with John Watson.” 

“You’d know better than anyone that sociopaths have no capacity to fall in love,” Eddie said gently. 

“John Watson, “ I repeated. 

“And who is he?” 

“He’s my best friend who is walking around the world. He is a soldier and a doctor. I’m in love with him.” 

“Why?” 

That is actually an excellent question. Why love anyone? On first examination it seems intangible, unfathomable, but when you think about it really carefully, you shine a light on a whole world of possibilities and beautiful, unsullied reason. 

According to Eddie, once you have worked out the reasons you love a person, you automatically have the tools you need to make the relationship work, provided of course the person you love would like to assist in those mechanics. 

However, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

I was able to work out why one generic person might love another generic person. I was able to work out why I loved my insufferable brother, my parents, Detective Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, my landlady and my friend Molly at St Bart’s lab where I steal test tubes and Petri dishes. 

But I was never able to adequately explain to Eddie why I loved John Watson because at that time I didn’t know. To be fair, I’d only worked out that I loved him in the last few months. I’d never had feelings like that for anyone, so actually defining or quantifying them seemed a bit premature. 

*** 

When I wasn’t wondering why I loved John Watson, I had physical therapy to restore the strength in my abdominal wall, and I had to attend a 12 step therapy program which I’d done before with some success.

I had to go to group therapy too, but not for long. I was assessed as unsuitable after my first session when I got bored and deduced why every other patient was there. Three of them broke into tears, another three threatened me with various kinds of physical violence and two – both especially manipulative types – wanted to have sex with me. The counsellor taking that course had to take stress leave. 

(It wasn’t my fault. I can’t help deducing people. Sometimes when I’m voicing my deductions the noises in my brain are so loud, I can’t even hear myself. Often when I can hear myself I still get surprised that everyone else can’t see what appears to be so obvious.)

They weren’t sure what else to do with me so I got shoved into the occupational therapy workshops and painted things. It didn’t make me feel better or worse, only momentarily interested in the composition of the paints and keenly aware that I had virtually no gifts for draughtsmanship at all. 

Mostly, though, I was treated by Eddie, who didn’t want to cure me of anything. He liked talking with me, and wanted to know why I felt I couldn’t love people properly. 

And after three weeks I was allowed to have a swim, which was brilliant. 

But the thing I enjoyed most was sending music to John. Mycroft had very kindly delivered my violin after I had been incarcerated for a month and was reported to be progressing. 

I never bothered playing inside, mostly because a lot of the other residents were living on the edge of their nerve endings and likely to implode in reaction to the most mundane stimulus, or they were idiots. 

So I used to walk to the edge of the grounds – as far as I was allowed – and play to the air, which I trusted to take the music directly to John, where ever he was.


	8. Chapter 8

Would it be alright if loved John Watson and never knew the reasons why? Would I love him better, and more authentically, if I understood why I loved him? 

Those questions made my head feel misshapen from the inside. 

I couldn’t work it out. The things I loved about him – well, the things I could readily identify – weren’t surprising: he was brave, loyal, intelligent, quick witted, ethical, a man of principal. 

But that could describe hundreds of thousands of people. 

I can’t deny that I was ardently attracted to him physically. Bad tempered blonde men with broad shoulders have always held a particular fascination for me. But John isn’t the only bad tempered, broad-shouldered blonde in the world. 

It seemed there were things I loved about John that I couldn’t see or hear. Secret things. 

For a while there, I wondered if I loved him because I couldn’t deduce why I loved him. Then I wondered if this is what dull people meant when they sang songs about their paramour casting a spell on them.


	9. Chapter 9

I was in rehab/recovery/mental health treatment for nearly five months. When I first got there I was still too sick to hate it, and by the time I recovered fully from my infected bullet wound I was too disorientated, and too emotionally unstable, to have serious objections to being locked up. Also, they had bread and butter pudding for dessert at least two nights a week and frankly I would saw off my right arm for a good bread and butter pudding sometimes. 

Mostly though, if I am honest, the main reason I stayed was because I missed John horribly, and I thought that if I could convince everyone I was well enough, I could pack up and walk around the world and try and catch up with him. 

I know a fantastic restaurant down near the dock in Surat Thani in Thailand. I did the owner an enormous favour six years ago. I would love for John to try the seafood hot pot there. With me.


	10. Chapter 10

A lot of people came to visit me after my first month. Mrs Hudson came first. She wore one of her going-out dresses and brought me a copy of the Guardian and a bag of Bassett’s jelly babies. I’ve never professed a particular predilection to either, so it was a nice surprise. 

“Sherlock!” she said in her strangely uninvolved way. “Look at you in hospital! You look like you’ve been eating!” 

“Hello, Mrs Hudson.” I kissed her cheek, which is always enjoyable because she wears Lancome transparent powder (150 Ivoire) and it smells perfect on her. The fragrance suggests to me that it is bound with a good synthetic rose oil. 

We sat outside in the main courtyard. It is splendid to be visited by Mrs Hudson – she is interested in lots of things and is never dull. I told her about the hospital, mostly; she was particularly keen to know why everyone was there. Sadly we were all there because we were addicts, self harming addicts, mentally deranged addicts (I think that was me, but could never get that confirmed), dangerous addicts or serving out part of a Court agreement (that was definitely me). To make up for my general understanding of my fellow patients’ misdemeanors, I told her who was having an affair with whom (there were about eight affairs going on between patients while I was there; I can’t be certain of the exact number because I deleted it when I was discharged) and I was also able to tell her about the bathrooms, which had been modified to stop us hanging ourselves or hiding any kind of substances. 

Mrs Hudson likes those kinds of details. 

We had nearly run out of interesting things to talk about when she grabbed her purse, as if an exciting thing had occurred to her. Which it had. 

“Oh! I nearly forgot! Dr Watson sent me a post card. Would you like to see it?” 

I never know how to respond when people ask me questions like that. I understand the social contract requires me to act calm and say yes, please, but in fact I want to smash furniture and grasp people by the shoulders and shake them until I’m certain they understand how badly I want the information. Not that I would do that to Mrs Hudson. She already knew. 

Eleven Jumpers Watson wrote to her from Reunion, a volcanic island that belongs to France but is situated in the Indian Ocean on the east coast of Africa. The post card showed a picture of the great gull that, according to the little blurb on the back, is the symbol of the island. 

Apparently John Watson walked to the volcano there the day before. I longed to be at the heaving smoke-belching stoma with him. 

I read the card four times, going over every pen stroke for any sign that he was coming home. However, it is John’s great gift (one of his great gifts) that he can say virtually nothing while making you think he has fully appraised you of a situation. All I knew is that he was planning on flying to Madagascar soon. 

Mrs Hudson let me keep the post card. It was, until I got back to my flat at least, the only thing I had of him and it made me want to dance and run back to the crack house at the same time. 

*** 

Detective Inspector Lestrade came to visit me too. He bought me two eccles cakes in a pink bag, which was an old joke between us. Lestrade is sweetly sentimental like that. 

(Eddie told me that I should become more sentimental. I told him there was more chance that I would produce a Constable in occupational therapy.) 

Lestrade and I talked mostly about crimes. There had been a couple of significant arrests in a very large fraud matter that started just before I went on my three week drug-fuelled hiatus, and currently the team was trying to get a break through in a series of armed robberies. Lestrade wouldn’t give me any details though. 

“You need to get better,” he said with his serious face. His eyes look to be very dark but when you study at them carefully you can see that they are a very uniform brown, just lacking in glints, or chips of pale colours usually found in human irises . 

“I am better. The only reason I’m here is because I use a lot of drugs sometimes.” 

“And you don’t eat and you don’t sleep. And you’re wound up like a ball of electrical wire. And you’re still recovering from your - the hiatus.” 

”Yes. I’m intense,” I agreed. (I actually had been diagnosed with post traumatic stress syndrome but that bored me to the point of a coma. I hated talking about it.) 

“That’s an understatement. You need to get better. We’re all worried about you.” 

People tell you that they’re worried as a kind of gift, a compliment, but I can’t see the point. Worrying about me (or anything) wasn’t going to improve my health (or anything else). I had no idea to say. People don’t like to be told not to worry so I changed the subject. 

“Have you heard from John?” 

His one-note eyes looked a little sad. “No mate, I haven’t. Sorry.” 

I shrugged. I wasn’t surprised. John would be more inclined to send a postcard to Lestrade from somewhere like Singapore, and he wouldn’t be there yet. 

The eccles cakes were good. I ate one that night in bed while I timed the space between the snores of my next door neighbour, and at the other one the next night when the oil had rendered the bag transparent. 

It aged well - tasted drier and the fruit was a little more tart. 

***  
And of course Molly came. 

“Oh Sherlock,” she kept saying while she dabbed her eyes. 

I wasn’t really sure what to do with her. I think Molly needs therapy more than I do but none of my doctors were there when she visited. I decided that I should change the subject. 

“How’s Twinkles?” 

“Who’s that?” 

“Your cat.” 

“Toby! He’s wonderful!” 

And then she showed me nine different videos of Toby doing precisely nothing in her flat. It was actually very interesting because I deduced Toby realised he was being filmed and didn’t protest, which illustrates clearly that I was still not one hundred per cent recovered because I can’t deduce what cats are thinking. No one can. 

Molly is as interesting and kindly as Mrs Hudson but more law abiding. She’s not dull, though. She is incredibly perceptive. Doctor Eddie would say she has an extremely high emotional intelligence. Which she has.

Molly bought me a book about the periodic table, which brought me much comfort. I read it in bed that night. It had pictures. (You might like to read it. It is called The Elements, by Theodore Gray and is written for people who don’t like chemistry but wished that they did. If you’re missing the periodic chart, like I was, I daresay you’ll find it very comforting too.) 

It is a source of grief to me that Molly harbours hopes that I may some day turn out to be normal and court her in an appropriate fashion. Of course I am more likely to grow sentimental before that happens but I don’t know how to tell her that so I kept the visit focused largely on the indolent Toby. 

After I watched all the Toby videos I asked her to play them all again because I knew that would make her happy, and I wish fervently that Molly will always be happy. 

“Have you heard from John?” I asked her as she was leaving. 

She gave me a very soulful look, which is actually her normal resting face. 

“No, I haven’t. If I do, I’ll tell you.” She chewed her thin lips for a moment. “You do know he will come back to you, don’t you?” 

I knew nothing of he sort. John Watson seemed farther away from me than he’d been before we met. It seemed pointless to say this so I just gave her a kind smile. “Say hello to Toby for me.” 

***

Mycroft bought my parents twice. They were monumentally disappointed in me, as they had been as far back as I can remember, and were also determined to assure me that they were entirely forgiving of me, and at great personal cost. 

I can’t tell you anything more about those visits because I deleted them as soon as they left.


	11. Chapter 11

I was in hospital (or whatever they call it) for a total of four months and three weeks. I understand the British Government paid my bills because (I deduced) Mycroft had represented my addiction and mental instability as being symptomatic of the work I did while I was dead and then having to come home and (theoretically) kill Moriarty, who is a marginally (alright, somewhat) interesting criminal with fabulous dress sense, a second time.

As soon as I got home, all I wanted to do was write to the Prime Minister and say THEY LOCKED ME UP ONLY BECAUSE I AM IN LOVE WITH JOHN WATSON – DO YOU WANT ME TO PAY THE MONEY BACK?

I just wanted to tell someone. 

When I came home to my flat, it still looked like nothing happened to the person who lived there but that was a relief to me then. I didn’t want anything to happen to me. Too much had happened to me and I was not entirely recovered from it. 

All the electrical whirring noises my thinking generates had been reduced to a tiny buzz at that stage and I felt very calm. 

Mrs Hudson had put clean sheets on my bed and milk in the fridge. 

Molly had been around and left a huge bunch of yellow flowers in a the largest specimen jar she could find (the jars that are used for livers, potions of limbs large tumerous growths. I felt better just seeing that jar. Comforted.). 

Lestrade, bless his heart, had delivered five boxes of cold cases. All unsolved murders! One of his diligent and entirely misguided office juniors had drawn up a spread chart that detailed each case and an estimated time of completion. I threw it in the bin. 

John Watson’s worst jumper was still folded in my wardrobe. 

I sat on my couch for a long time, thinking. When I woke up the light had gone and there were shadows all around the room. 

I had never felt so lonely.


	12. Chapter 12

I had entered what I now refer to as the dead zone of my life. I had been hospitalised for months so coming home was a little like holidays from boarding school: you can’t believe your sudden freedom yet you can’t quite get out of the routine you’d been instructed to follow all term. 

My bed was strange, my couch was strange, my kitchen was strange and being able to do whatever I wanted was strange. 

Mycroft came to visit me daily, then after three weeks every couple of days, and then twice weekly. 

Lestrade dropped by whenever he felt like it - early morning sometimes, late afternoon other times. These seemingly spontaneous visits were planned, obviously to catch me if I was using drugs again. 

Molly called and texted, Mrs Hudson would pop in. 

There was, I believe, a Team Sherlock in action. I didn’t mind. 

I worked on the cold cases all day. Some of them were cold cases for a good reason: some had a body but no weapon, no witnesses, no motive; others had a weapon and plenty of motive but no body. 

One case dated back to 1970 – a thirty eight year old man found in his bedsit with a bludgeoned head. They’d never recovered the weapon; forensic reports seemed to indicated a cricket bat. The crime scene photos showed him fully dressed, laying face down beside his miserable single bed that was neatly made. The witness statements were scarce, just a couple of colleagues who were able to provide scant details – that he worked at the post office and liked to go to the cinema. 

He had two sisters in Edinburgh who saw him at Christmas. They had given statements but could offer no clues. Police reports don’t establish whether he was robbed. I’d say for certain that he was, but we’ll never know. It was maddening. I kept looking for the careless thread, the thread I could tug to unravel the whole story, but there was nothing. 

Other cases had more detail, like the cleaner who was found in a shopping arcade who had been stabbed forty times in the throat and chest in 1974. She was a woman in her late fifties and had started her shift at 5am. The manager found her at 7.30am. The autopsy report showed very definite wounds made by a kitchen knife. I immediately suspected her husband, but as I read through the file I learnt he committed suicide two weeks after she was buried. The last police reports say he was crippled by grief; I rather thought remorse or guilt or both. 

(Multiple wounds to the face, throat and heart are personal. The killer is stabbing at something quite specific and with a lot of misdirected passion. People who are stabbed in pub brawls, or when robbed by strangers, have one or two wounds. Multiple wounds are nearly always inflicted by someone close - the closer to the face with the knife, the closer to the heart of the killer, who lashes out at what they see everyday: face, throat, chest, arms. There are exceptions, of course, but they are usually the result of a serious mental illness. ) 

Some of the cold cases were destined to never grow warm again.

*** 

At night I’d lie in the dark and wonder why I loved John Watson. I still hadn’t worked it out. 

John Watson and I were a cold case. We had a corpse of a relationship, a few clues as to motive but there simply wasn’t enough evidence to work out what had happened and who was responsible. 

What we did have was sentiment and chemical imbalance but both of us had discounted that: me, because I always did, and John, only because I did and he could no longer trust his own feelings. 

And every day, while John Watson walked farther and farther away, our case got colder.


	13. Chapter 13

We had never come close, John Watson and I, to sorting out what we actually were. 

John called us best friends once but I don’t really know what that means. When he told me I had to wait until he was gone and look it up on Google. I couldn’t find anything that really described us. I think we were much more than best friends. 

I liked John from the moment I met him. He is as you find him – honest, devoted, a man of great moral fortitude – and he doesn’t utilise any kind of artifice. That’s a rare thing. Most people employ a bit (or a lot) of artifice in their every day life and their personality is a cocktail of the faces they use in public and the person they are in private. John Watson is pure, unblended flavours. He is always polite because he believes that is the best way to treat another person. He is never willingly cruel. But he’s not garrulous either. He can be quite curt, prickly even. He will not court you with mindless small talk if he doesn’t want to speak with you. 

Also, he is disarmingly attractive. 

John Watson is short and blond and smiles mildly when he’s about to break your jaw. He looks like a man who got lost in British Homes Stores while looking for the sleepwear section but he is, in fact, an incredibly passionate man with a continual rage on a low heat at all times and carrying a loaded gun. Fire him up and he bursts into flames. 

It’s incredibly alluring, his simmering rage. 

Sadly, I never understood that I was in love with him until his wedding, and sadder still that I realised that he reciprocated those feelings the night before his wife shot me a second time. 

The child’s real father had reported Mrs Watson to Social Services, for reasons I still haven’t learnt. I’m guessing they had some kind of disagreement. 

Social services had come to John’s home unannounced and taken his daughter from him. Many of the details of Mrs Watson’s vast deception were relayed to John at that time, including proof that the child was not a Watson. Mrs Watson wasn’t there at the time.

I was aware of some of those details about Mrs Watson a few months before and told John the bare essentials; he in turn cut all contact with me until that night, when he stormed out of the marital home and charged over to my home, blaming me for the whole crumbling mess. (I had nothing to do with it, for a change. John was upset and, as I’ve described, he can get fired up.) 

At that time I had grown quite unhinged – depression maybe, post traumatic stress definitely, and wasn’t able to fight him like he wanted me to fight him. He had just lost his daughter and was in terrible pain, but all I could do was stare at him and think how much I loved him, and how ill-equipped I was to deal with his tragedy. 

My lack of action made him more angry. He yelled and kicked things for ten minutes or so, and then stood in front me, disoriented, as if he’d finally got to the end of a very long road that he’d been travelling in blinkers. 

We turned out to be the cliff at the end of each other’s road. 

So he followed me to my room, lay down with me and kissed me. There was no hesitation. It was wonderful, more satisfying and much more meaningful than I expected. I hadn’t realised how much you can say to a person when you kiss them, probably because I’d never been in love with a person like I am with John Watson. 

Our first sexual encounter was not like our first kiss. We had rough, groping sex because John was angry and confused and I was half out of my mind. It was not what I wanted for our first time. I remember hoping that it would be sweeter, less angry, for our second time. (I still have that hope.) 

I haven’t kissed, or been kissed by, John Watson since that night. 

Because my life is never normal and never just one thing at a time, our new relationship was the least of our problems when I woke up a few hours later. John was leaning over me, one finger pressed to his lips to keep me quiet. It was raining very heavily and there were noises in the kitchen. 

We had a brief, wordless tussle as we looked for our pants, inadvertently put on each other’s pants and crept out to the kitchen where Mrs Watson   
was waiting, hysterical with hatred and pointing a gun at us both. 

I had, she screamed at me, ruined everything. 

Suddenly there were noises everywhere. I know now it was police coming to arrest her but at the time, still half asleep and crazed by love, I thought it was the army. She raised her gun and this time aimed for my heart. I stepped back and fell against John who was roaring at her and she faltered for a split second, lost her aim and missed my abdominal aorta by millimetres. 

I have no idea what happened after that; I woke up in hospital. It wasn’t as serious as the first time she shot me but it was more painful. 

John sat with me the whole time. That would have to be love, wouldn’t it? I thought it was love. He never declared it, though. It’s wretched, trying to figure out if he just can’t say it or just doesn’t love me. 

But it’s irrelevant, now that he’s walking around the world and I’m out in the cold, waiting to come back to life.


	14. Chapter 14

The Dead Zone ends here. 

John Watson had been walking the earth and (I hoped) overcoming his sickness of everything for nearly nine months when Adrienne showed up at my flat. I am still completely ignorant as to how she got my address, although I suppose I could have told her, along with my banking details and shirt size for all I know, while we were off our nuts in the crack house. 

She was heavily pregnant. 

Mrs Hudson was visiting the less likable of her nieces in Albuquerque and wasn’t due home for another week, which was the one good thing that happened that week. Well, one of two good things. 

I stared at Adrienne when I opened the door because all her symptoms of pregnancy were rushing at me and I wanted to catalogue them as quickly as I could. I don’t get to speak with women at nearly full term very often and there are many important clues that I wanted to note. For example: did you know the lining in a woman’s nose has increased sensitivity to scent during pregnancy AND that this sensitivity is carried over to the first few weeks post partum? The flesh around Adrienne’s nose was a little puffy. 

Things like that. 

I didn’t remember her name when I first saw her. In fact I remembered very little about her aside from the fact she offered to unpick my stitches with her nail file. 

“Hello,” I said eventually. “How are you?” 

“It’s yours,” is all she said. 

I didn’t believe her. 

I let her come inside. I had a box of cereal and some bread, so I was able to make her cereal and toast, all of which she ate in a few shuddering gulps. 

She had been living with her sister, she told me, and hadn’t visited a doctor at all. I don’t know much about pregnant women but I thought that was an oversight. 

Then she told me that her boyfriend was going to kill me unless I gave him eighty thousand pounds to raise the baby. That sounded like a lot. 

“Why does he need so much?” 

Adrienne was looking out the window. She didn’t find me very interesting at all. “For honour and stuff.” 

That’s the thing about drugs. Adrienne wouldn’t even notice me if we sat opposite each other on the tube, but a few puffs of heroin and here we are, apparently about to have a baby. 

“Why don’t we go down to the hospital and get you checked out?” I said nicely. I felt like some fresh air anyway. 

Adrienne, who I was starting to think had a very high bar for excitement, shrugged her shoulders. 

I took her to the University College Hospital. Molly once said they had good maternity services there. 

 

***

We waited in the A&E room for three hours. I had to explain repeatedly to the idiots who worked there that Adrienne had not seen a doctor once in her pregnancy and that she needed to be assessed in order to book her in somewhere to have a baby. 

It all turned out to be moot because she went into labour in the waiting room. 

They asked if I wanted to attend the birth, which was a stupid question. Of course I didn’t want to. One of the nurses glared at me and said “Aren’t you the father?” and I said “Probably not.” Then she glared at me as if I was the world’s worse liar (which is wrong – I am a GREAT liar) so I went in reluctantly. 

I got to wear scrubs, which reminded me of John. He once showed me a picture of himself wearing scrubs and I was reminded again that I was an idiot not to steal it. 

During the course of the labour I learnt that Adrienne was twenty two, and that her last name was Portelli. At least that’s what she told them. I would find out months later that no person of that name at that age lives in Great Britain. 

I also learnt that babies being born is not one of the most attractive ways in which the human condition makes itself known. 

Adrienne was in labour for four hours and I had to wait there the whole time. She screamed a lot at the end. I rather wished I could too. It was markedly unpleasant. 

And then a strange thing happened. 

The midwife held up this odd, blood streaked bag of suet-looking thing that turned out to be the baby, and he looked around at her, and at the other nurses, and then at me, all with a look on his face that said “Who are you idiots”, and then he wailed, and I knew as firmly as I know my own name that he was mine.


	15. Chapter 15

From the first moment I saw my son, I couldn’t stop looking at him. It was if my eyes had been programmed to follow his every move. It was unnerving. I followed the nurse and midwife around as they bathed him and weighed him; all the time he was roaring at all them to keep their filthy hands to themselves, and then they invited me to cut his umbilical cord, which I though was a nice touch. He hated that too. Then, as I hovered still, they tried to get Adrienne to hold him and she waved her hands at him and swore at them rather gratuitously and complained that she wanted to sleep. 

“I will,” I said very loudly. “I want to hold him.”

The nurse was exhausted and didn’t care. He had worked a fourteen hour shift and had not taken a meal break. He had to get public transport to work and he hadn’t had time to do his washing. 

The midwife looked at me suspiciously. She worked two jobs and was caring for an elderly parent. 

(It didn’t occur to me that the hospital staff thought we were both irresponsible drug addicts until Social Services came to check up on me a couple months later.) 

They wrapped my baby up like a brandy snap and very carefully put him in my arms. 

I have heard countless dreary accounts from new parents declaring that they fell in love with their infant at first sight, most of them from poor John Watson. 

Adrienne seemed to have no interest in him at all. 

I didn’t fall in love. I just had big globs of the stuff oozing from me like custard when you squash a profiterole, big globs of untested love that were already there, waiting to be used.

At the time I thought it might have been all the unwanted love I had for John Watson, although obviously that was wrong. Still, at that moment, it seemed an efficient form of recycling, to redirect all that unused love to my son. 

My son. When first you say that, and it is true, you start to see your whole life in an entirely different light. 

***

 

Adrienne refused point blank to feed our son. This created an enormous stand-off between Adrienne, the midwife and the extremely tired nurse who had been present at the birth. The midwife wanted Adrienne to breastfeed, the nurse said it didn’t matter and that no one should be forced to do anything they didn’t want to. Adrienne swore at them, made a impolite gesture with one finger before pulling the sheet over head and sighing loudly when the discussion extended beyond thirty seconds. 

Eventually the midwife stormed off and the nurse sort of sauntered out, only to return in a few minutes with a bottle. 

On cue, my exceptionally clever son started roaring at me for not providing a decent meal service. 

“Show you how to do it,” said the nurse, who was apparently too tired to even use complete sentences. He adjusted my baby in my arms and demonstrated how to hold the bottle correctly so that my boy drank faux milk and not air. 

It was very interesting. He drank nearly twenty millilitres without even bothering to open his eyes. Then he yelled at me for giving him wind, and the nurse came back and showed me how to burp him. 

I loved how my baby felt on my shoulder, a tiny soft parcel that weighed about the same as three apples.

Then I learnt how to change a nappy. The nappy, made largely from paper fiber and covered with blue teddy bears (why?) was approximately seventy per cent bigger than him. His legs seemed to be made of plasticine and shaped like the mathematical symbols for greater and lesser. 

His mother, meanwhile, was sound asleep. The nurse checked her pulse, shrugged his shoulders and left me to it. 

I had a baby. 

“I’ve got a baby,” I said to the world at large. 

Again, on cue, my son opened his bleary eyes and looked at me with mild interest. 

“I’m your father,” I told him in a very quiet voice. “I play the violin and solve crimes. You can sleep in my lounge room when we get home.” 

This was of no interest to him at all and he went back to sleep. Everything bored him. 

I was immensely proud. 

***

If someone had asked me yesterday if I wanted to sit and watch a baby I would have insulted them and walked away. Today there was nothing in the world I wanted more. 

He had dark hair, my ears and my mouth, perfect sample–size reproductions of them. His fingers were long and his toes were red. He was as soft and silky as clotted cream when you dunk your hands into a vat of it, which I have done on three separate occasions. 

My heart did something strange as I watched him. It moved, actually moved, something like a flip, something strong and pulsing. 

When I was certain there was no one around who would yell at me, I unwrapped his little feet and stroked the soles. His feet folded perfectly, indicating that the clutch reflex was present, so he could grip a branch if necessary. He would lose that shortly, so I made a mental note to get a curtain rod and test it properly soon. 

My boy grew more interesting by the second, an entire person who fitted effortlessly into my hands. I’d never wanted to know a person as keenly as I wanted to know him. He was a blank slate, entirely beyond deduction. 

I touched each tiny knee cap. I very carefully ran my index finger over his little rib cage. My whole hand overlapped his tiny chest but I could feel each little rise as he took his breath. There were tiny little lungs, smaller than my nose, in there too.

I could fit my thumb over his entire shoulder. He had collar bones, elbows and wrists. There were even little armpits. It had never occurred to me that armpits could be so small. When I’d fully absorbed that he had armpits, I carefully unfolded his fingers and put my pinkie in his palm and watched, open mouthed, as he closed his own threads of fingers around mine. 

I took 23 photos, all of him. 

Then I took out my magnifying glass and went over his entire little face and committed it all to memory.

Every millimetre was perfect.


	16. Chapter 16

There was not one thing in my flat that was of any purpose to a new baby. 

When the exhausted nurse finally kicked me out of the hospital, I went home and read everything I could to find out what I needed. Which turned out to be a lot. 

I tried to then work out what Adrienne needed. She had come to my place with just her phone and a packet of cigarettes, so she was clearly domiciled elsewhere, perhaps with her sister as she claimed. Did she want to live with us? I would have to buy more sheets if she did. 

In the interim, I got her some absorbent things not unlike the nappies I saw last night and some more bread, in case she wanted toast again. I had to guess the right kind of absorbent things – all the websites I read gave me conflicting advice. I figured I could always use them for experiments if I got the wrong type. 

I rang the hospital twice that night. I wanted to know my son was alright. They said he was, but I could hear a lot of screaming in the back ground. I deduced they were all the other less composed babies. 

I was still shopping on line when Adrienne called me the next morning to see if I had the money. I’d forgotten all about it, which isn’t like me. 

“How is the baby?” 

“Dunno,” she said. “Alright, I suppose. Breakfast sucked.” 

“I’m going to buy him some things. What have you got so far?” 

“Nothing.” 

“Have you thought about a name?” 

“Dunno. You pick something.” 

She wasn’t helping. 

I chose his name while I was buying very small blankets. Later that morning I called Mycroft and asked if I could have eighty thousand pounds from my bank account. 

“Why do you need so much money?” 

“A drug lord who I doubled-crossed in the crack house wants to kill me.” 

It was perfectly plausible. He sent the cash over in unmarked bills. 

My brother called me back later that morning. “Are you buying nursery furniture from department stores? I’ve had an alert on your credit card.” 

I told him a passable lie about helping a friend, which would have been good if I actually had any friends. “It’s for a case,” I added hopefully. 

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, it was a waste of time lying to Mycroft because I had done so for years and he was masterful at discerning when I was lying, which was nearly all the time. Now I’ve reached that happy stage when I’ve lied so much, and lived a fairly interesting life, so it’s difficult for him to tell when I am lying or not. For example, I was once stalked for six days by female twins with a bipolar disorder who were convinced I was the anti-Christ. They were the nieces of a man I was investigating. They followed me everywhere, whispering. If I turned around to ask them to go away, they’d hold up a small crucifix or splash me with holy water. “Can you hear it sizzle?” one would say to the other. 

I use this tedious story to illustrate the fact that a lot of seemingly untrue things actually happen to me, which is why Mycroft, more often than not, will give me the benefit of the doubt. 

(It probably wasn’t real holy water. It definitely didn’t sizzle when it hit my skin. In case you were wondering.)


	17. Chapter 17

Perhaps in hindsight I bought too many baby things. I had no idea what I was doing, and reasoned that it was better to have eight bottles and four blankets with matching pillows than being snowed in some bleak night with a freezing hungry baby and have nothing. 

The crib was fun. I had to put that together myself. I love those slips of paper with directions that tell you how to put all the pieces together. I set it next to the couch so we could sleep side by side. 

*** 

The hospital recorded me as the baby’s father, and Adrienne Portelli (whoever she was) as his mother. 

We took him home two days after he was born. Adrienne was still completely uninterested. She refused to hold him and refused to feed him, preferring to play some squeaking game on her phone instead. 

I had to buy a tin of powder – largely proteins and amino acids in a benign base – so he could eat. 

I wasn’t too worried. I thought I could look after him in this very early stage and she might be inclined to mother him when he started talking and engaging with his surroundings. 

*** 

When we got home, I was able to feed him, burp him, change him and rock him to sleep with out any major incident. 

I took notes about the way he reacted to burping and how long it took him to get to sleep. Then I took notes about how frequently he moved in his sleep. (He moved his little fists a lot, which I am certain he gets from me, because I gesticulate frequently, especially when I am explaining things.)

Adrienne went to bed as soon as we got home, in the former Watson room. She was texting someone, and talking on the phone with someone, so I imagine the drug lord who was going to kill me would be coming around for his eighty grand soon. 

But no one came. Had I not been so mesmerised by my son, I would have worked out almost immediately what was going on.

As it was, I stayed awake until 5am watching him and taking notes and providing a bottle when he yelled at me, then I fell asleep next to his new crib and didn’t wake until he started squalling at 8.13. 

By which time Adrienne, and the 80 000 pounds, and my cigarette lighter, were gone. 

She didn’t even leave a note.


	18. Chapter 18

I would have gone looking for her but babies straight off the production line are incredibly time consuming. Apart from actually having to operate his body for him, I wanted to tell Albion as much as I possibly could about everything. Most of the early childhood specialists agree that we take the most information, that which will form half of what we learn in a lifetime, by the age of two. 

There wasn’t much time. I had to tell him EVERYTHING. 

Also, he was fascinating. I couldn’t stop staring at him, which I imagine is some kind of evolutionary trick to ensure that if he got mixed up with a whole lot of other babies, I could pick him out immediately. 

When he was fractious I would talk to him about weather. I explained high pressure systems, low pressure systems, how thunder and lightening are formed and what scientists currently surmise is the rate of global warming. 

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it made him angrier. It’s possible Albion is a climate change denier. 

When he slept I talked to him about gravity mostly because it is fascinating and also so he’d have a head start on all the other kids at school.

At this stage though, Albion pretty much disliked anything except eating and sleeping. He took it as a personal slight when I bathed him, and acted like I was trying to disembowel him when I changed his nappy. 

I admired his spirit. I wished more than once that Three Pairs of Brogues Watson could meet him.


	19. Chapter 19

I started to believe that John would never come home because he’s thorough, and because he likes setting people’s world to right. 

John doesn’t just go somewhere, stand at the lookout for a few minutes and go home. He walks up the main street, checks the map, finds out where the library is, has a look a the local museum,. talks to the volunteer who works at the museum, asks them where he should have lunch, goes there to have lunch, tries to pick up the waitress, goes down to the tourist information centre, gets a complimentary map, has a look at their appalling permanent exhibition of the history of the local jam factory (or insert whatever local attraction you think is appropriate), goes and looks at the factory in person, talks to someone he meets near the jam factory – you get the picture. 

I deduced early on that he is thorough like this because he was a soldier and in that capacity spent an inordinate amount of time studying the lay of the land. 

And he likes to get things back on track, which I think is also residual from his soldiering days. When he first moved into my flat he fixed a cupboard in the kitchen that I would have never had noticed was broken and repaired one of the taps at the bathroom sink. John Watson would be walking all over the world, looking at local museums, doing people’s washing up in Shanghai, nailing down pieces of loose carpet in Stockholm, walking someone’s dog in Fresno, sweeping out someone’s igloo in the North Pole, trimming rubber trees in Kuala Kangsar, shooting a drug lord in Columbia, escorting a child to school in Nimes – there are enough chores and local museums world wide to keep him occupied forever. 

It is perfectly feasible, and the cause of immeasurable sadness to me, that I might never see him again.


	20. Chapter 20

I had Albion to myself for three blissful days. He was the smartest baby I have ever met. I made pages of notes. 

On the fourth day I got a call from Mycroft. 

“What have you been doing, mon frere? I’ve not heard from you since I gave you money to chase away the drug lord. Did he try to kill you or was eighty thousand enough?” 

“I think it was enough.” 

Albion was asleep in his crib, I had been measuring the length of his bones so I could calculate his height as an adult. His soft shadow of dark hair was sticking up like the spikes on tropical caterpillars. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen and couldn’t stop touching it. 

“Have you been well?” 

“Yes. Completely. But I have to go.” 

And I hung up, which was stupid because Mycroft would now come over to see what I was doing. 

Later that afternoon, when Albion was yelling at me for being an idiot for not being able to settle him down, Mrs Hudson, apparently home from Albuquerque, knocked on my door. 

“Hoo hoo!” she said by way of greeting. “Have you got a baby in there?” 

“NO! But don’t come in, I haven’t got any clothes on.” 

Albion roared louder. I had read that new born babies miss being in the womb for their first few days so I had wrapped him up very securely and was pacing the floor, holding him very close to my chest while I tried to work out what I could do to recreate the womb for him. The only thing I could think of was the bags that apparently go in the old vacuum cleaner. 

“I’ll show you the photos later, then.” 

“Lovely!” 

“I’ve seen her photos of Albuquerque six times and they never change,” I told Albion. That seemed to interest him and he went quiet, obviously hoping to hear more. “Albuquerque is a large town in New Mexico, which is one of the fifty states of the United States, a large land mass in the Northern Hemisphere. The other states are New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia – “ 

But he went to sleep. 

“I’ll tell you the others when you wake up again.” 

After I settled him in his crib, I went on line to get some more formula and nappies. I wondered how long he’d stay in newborn nappies. I wondered too about the formula - it bothered me a little. Obviously it would have been far more beneficial for him to be breastfed but even I have my limits. 

In any case, I was weighing him every eight hours and knew he had already gained forty two grams so obviously I was doing something right. 

When there was a knock at the door just after six , I thought it would have to be the delivery person but it was Detective Inspector Lestrade. 

He looked at me carefully. “Where have you been? I haven’t heard from you for days. I thought you might be sick.” Which was code for: I thought you were chasing the dragon again. 

The Detective Inspector came striding in, looking around in case there was a clue, any clue, that might be useful in any of the countless criminal investigations his team were currently failing to solve. He takes that approach everywhere. He’s always looking for clues and so rarely finding any. 

Albion chose that moment to remind me that I am an idiot who can’t provide him with a quiet sleeping environment. 

“Have you got a baby in here?” Lestrade asked. He looked hopeful. 

I couldn’t deny it. In any case Albion was growing furious so I had to pick him up. 

“Yes.” I was bending down over his crib and Lestrade bent over with me. 

“Jesus! He’s brand new! What’s he doing here?” 

I was dreading this bit. “He’s mine.” 

Lestrade went dead, as if someone had accidentally disconnected his cables. 

Albion stopped crying for a few seconds and stared at us both briefly, correctly assumed we were both idiots who were going to disappoint him and started crying again. 

Lestrade followed me to the kitchen while I grabbed another bottle. I could feel him thinking: Sherlock’s stolen a baby. 

“Sherlock,” he started, but was distracted by how adequately I managed to feed my son. “Sorry, but that is seriously doing my head in, you feeding a baby.” 

He watched for a few seconds and started again. 

“Sherlock, this is a new born baby. You can’t steal new born babies.”

This is the level of stupidly I have to tolerate almost hourly. 

“I didn’t steal him. He’s mine. I’ve got papers.” 

Lestrade looked at me like he does when I explain the most basic, most obvious elements of a crime to him – wanting to believe, but not quite able to understand. I broke it down into easily digested, bite-sized pieces. 

“I met a girl the last time I was in the crack house. We shared our stash. I apparently impregnated her. She turned up a couple of days ago, gave birth and stole eighty thousand pounds and my cigarette lighter. She left my baby here.” 

I am sorry to say the Detective Inspector’s first response was not a refined one. 

“You had sex?” 

I didn’t even look up at that, just sighed pointedly and waited for him to continue. 

“Jesus – so there’s a mother out there somewhere needing medical attention?” 

I would have thought congratulations would have been in order at this point, but like I said – stupidity. Hourly. 

“She was fine. She had the baby in the hospital. Doctors saw him and said he was in perfect health. He was discharged. I’ve got papers.” 

Personally I couldn’t see what all the fuss about but Lestrade was growing more distressed. He wanted to call social services. 

“What? Are you insane? Call them for what?” 

He actually didn’t know. 

Albion was completely dismissive of the whole thing, sucking down synthetic milk like there was no tomorrow. I caught that little smirk of satisfaction on his tiny dial and my heart did that thing again. 

Lestrade was looking too. “God, he actually looks like you.” 

“Of course he looks like me. Who do you think a baby I made is going to look like? Noddy Holder?” 

The slurping, airy sounds that signalled Empty Bottle were upon us. We assumed the burp position. 

“I actually don’t know what to say.” Lestrade had a kind, almost beatific smile. 

“Congratulations, is, I believe, the standard offering.” 

“Congratulations. Do you mind if we do a blood test, just to be sure?” 

Albion bought fourth the first of three incredible blasts of wind. He was prodigious. 

“Blood tests for what?” 

“To - just to be certain. That he’s yours. In case she was lying.” 

“You can do whatever tests you like.” 

“And do you mind if I see the papers?” 

They were on the table somewhere. “Take them. Actually, take them, make me a couple of copies and bring them back.” 

“Thank you. Now, I have to ask you one more important question.” 

The second wind blast forth. I still hadn’t reconciled how so much gas could fit in such a tiny body. 

“Ask.” 

“Can I have a cuddle with your son?” 

I thought it was a soon enough for Albion to experience how someone might hold him. Also – Lestrade has a horde of children. It was likely I could learn something. 

***

Later that evening, I got a text from the Detective Inspector, telling me that he’d dropped by to give me a postcard sent to him by Two Hemispheres Watson. Apparently my mesmerising son distracted him from his task completely. I’m happy to say the card was from Singapore, where the wandering doctor had visited Changi Prison. That would have had huge significance for John. Once again I wished I could have been there in the humidity with him. It would be fascinating to hear his impressions.


	21. Chapter 21

Lestrade had baby confidence. He knew how to hold Albion without making him cry, knew to keep his special little head supported, knew how to hold him so he felt secure and certain that he wasn’t about to be dropped. I worried that by the time I had developed baby confidence, Albion would be ready to start school. 

Developing baby confidence was one of my current challenges.

Mrs Hudson was another, and most immediate. She is a great advocate of popping in, and there was only so many time I could plead nakedness. (My record is three days, although I was actually naked that time. For science.) 

In any case, Mrs Hudson is most dear to me. I wanted Albion to know her as soon as possible. 

Better to face it head on, so I wrapped Albion up in his best bunny rug (it is covered in actual bunny prints – Peter Rabbit, to be exact) (I have a weakness for brass buttons), tried to smooth down his hair and took him down stairs to meet his landlady. 

“Mrs Hudson!” I called at her door. 

“What is it, Sherlock?” she called back. 

“I have a baby.” 

It was quiet for a few seconds. I have no idea what she does in there but I am certain it would surprise me. 

“Is that the one I heard before?” 

“Yes.” 

Albion started yelling at me for waking him up and making him hang around in the hall. 

Finally there were some noises in her flat and finally she opened the door. She looked at Albion with mild curiousity. 

“Oh Sherlock! Now where did you get that?” 

Mrs Hudson has lived such an extraordinary life that she never anticipates an obvious answer. 

“He’s mine.” 

“Really? Sherlock! Fancy you with a baby. Well, bring him in so I can get a good look.” 

Albion and I sat at her kitchen table. This calmed him down a little. Mrs Hudson leaned over him and stared very carefully, so I moved his blanket to enable her see his perfect face clearly. 

“He looks like you,” she decided after almost forty seconds. 

“Yes. I’m his father. He should.” 

“Did you have sex?” She asked this the same way you might ask a person about the unicorn they were riding.

“Apparently.” 

“Did you like it?” 

Only Mrs Hudson would get to the heart of the matter so innocently. This is why I like her so much. 

“I don’t remember. Possibly.” 

““I bet you didn’t. Are you going to keep him?” 

“I certainly am.” That he was mine to keep was one of the two best things that ever happened to me. 

“Well, he’s a lucky boy! You’re going to be a wonderful father, Sherlock. And just wait until Dr Watson comes back. That little boy will have the best care in the world. Now hold tight and I’ll put the kettle on.” She went over to the stove and chattered while she lit the hob. “What’s his name?” 

“Albion.” 

She turned and gave me her gorgeous smile. “Oh, Sherlock. That is simply beautiful. Such a lovely, manly name.” 

Mrs Hudson didn’t want to hold Albion. I was not remotely surprised – Mrs Hudson is very motherly but not in the least maternal (and probably has no baby confidence). She was, however, very interested to hear about Adrienne. 

“Poor girl,” she said sadly. “I hope she gets some help.”

I was certain Adrienne would be getting lots of help via a pipe, but chose not to disclose that here. 

That night as I buttoned Albion in to his loungewear, I thought about Mrs Hudson assuring me that I would be a good father, and her unshakable faith that John Watson would return. Logically I could dissect that view, but emotionally it had made me so happy, that someone thought I could parent adequately and that John would come home. Those happy thoughts ensured I slept quite soundly until 2.37am, when Albion roared at me for sleeping while he was hungry.


	22. Chapter 22

I didn’t have a pram. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would need one. 

I didn’t know what they should do either, other than transport a baby and allow room for baby accoutrements. A quick scout around the internet put paid to that. I read of marriages actually breaking up because people had chosen the wrong pram. 

What is wrong with people? 

I ended up buying one from Mothercraft. It even came with a garland of plastic ducks that I put aside for the time when I teach Albion to use a scalpel properly. 

***  
Mycroft came to visit the next day. I was lying on my couch, reading about solid foods with Albion curled up like a hibernating dormouse and asleep on my chest, when he slunk in. He has a key but I never hear him use it. 

“What is that peculiar smell?” Mycroft said by way of greeting. Before I could answer, he started a bit then stood very still. “Who is that?” 

“This is Albion,” I said crisply. “Albion – this is Uncle Mycroft. I will give you all his credit card details when you’re old enough to shop on-line.” 

I have known Mycroft for thirty seven years and in that time, despite strenuous effort, I have never been able to render him speechless. Albion did so while he was asleep. There was little doubt that my baby was exceptional. 

Uncle Myc took a couple of steps towards me, opened his mouth and left it hanging, unable to say anything.

“Have you dropped by to gape at me or can I help you with something?”

“What do you mean, ‘yours’? Did you steal him?” He glared at us both with growing distress. “Oh Sherlock, for the love of God – did you use that money to buy a baby?” 

“Oh do shut up, Mycroft. No, I did not steal a baby and no, I didn’t buy one. I impregnated a girl in the crack house and she gave birth last week. She came back here, told me her boyfriend was going to kill me, stole the money and left me the baby. So I suppose in a way I did buy him, if in fact you can buy your own son.” 

“Did you have sex?” 

“Do you people think I can cause immaculate conception? Ask intelligent questions or leave now.” 

“Is he yours?” 

“Of course he’s mine. Look at him. In any case, Lestrade’s making me get blood tests.” 

Mycroft dragged a chair over and sat in front of us, as if he was observing an especially interesting zoo exhibition. 

“Was he born here?” 

I was starting to think it would be quicker if a I published a brochure about how Albion came to be my son. “No. He was born at University College Hospital.”

“How old is he?” 

“Four days and twenty three hours.” 

“And is his name Albion?” 

“Yes. Albion.” 

That pleased Mycroft enormously. I knew it would. 

There was some more gaping and then, rather softly, he asked, 

“May I hold him?”

“Of course. Don’t drop him.” 

“Oh do shut up, Sherlock.” 

I knew how this was going to finish. Mycroft would be stern and cautious, and then would melt and become like Olympia Dukakis in that film I saw once by accident but deleted straight after. 

(I kept her name because it is beautiful, and I thought I might have the opportunity to use it down the track. Who knows. I may have a daughter one day.)

Mycroft didn’t have baby confidence but he was transitioning, moving from hesitant towards smitten. Albion was entirely bored and slept through the whole proceedings, thus missing the moment when his uncle fell in love with him. 

“He’s very beautiful.” Mycroft was smiling sincerely, which I’d not seen him do since August, 1983. “He looks a lot like you.” 

“Of course he looks like me. I’m his father. He’s supposed to resemble me.” 

“Yes. You’re aware though, that from an evolutionary standpoint, he resembles you so you won’t eat him.” 

I didn’t even bother answering, just scowled at him.

“No, seriously, Sherlock. We’ve evolved to eat our young and kill of any competitors. If you were an ape and Albion didn’t look familiar to you, you’d kill him and possibly eat him.” 

Albion began to cry, and not without reason. No one wants to hear that their parent is just one species on the evolutionary chart from eating them.

“Stop frightening him and make yourself useful while I get his bottle ready.” 

Mycroft held the roaring Albion and followed me to the kitchen where I had bottles sterilising. The new uncle eyed my bottle sterilising equipment with a clinical eye. 

“Well, this is impressive. What is he eating?” 

“Formula. 80 grams with 200 millilitres of pure water.” 

Mycroft read the formula tin while rocking Albion gently. He hated that and yelled at Mycroft for being useless at rocking and at me for providing an idiot uncle. 

“Have you booked him into school yet?”

“Of course not. I’m going to home school him.” 

“You’ll do no such thing. He’s assured a place at Pimlico because of Father, and I’ll get him on the list for Eaton House when I get back to the office. I’m on good terms with the a couple of the Governors so he should get a place confirmed in a couple of days. Also, he’ll need a nanny while you’re doing cases.”

“And where am I going to put a nanny?” 

“Leave that with me.” 

“Mycroft, I don’t want a nanny living here and looking at me with cold judgmental eyes all day.” 

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll fix it. What do we know about the mother?” 

I explained the Adrienne situation to the best of my knowledge. “Lestrade will be tracking her down as I speak. He thinks I stole him.” 

I had the bottle ready and Albion was shrieking at me to hurry up. 

“May I feed him?” Uncle Mycroft asked. 

“Of course.” 

“Thank you. Now please take this opportunity to have a shower. You smell like a farm animal and I will not have my nephew subjected to that.”


	23. Chapter 23

The next day Mycroft came back with some company. Albion had just finished brunch; we standing at the window while I told him about Baker Street and explaining where the nearest tube stations were when I saw the black car pull over and the door open slowly. First came the umbrella, closely followed by Mycroft, and then came my mother and then my father. 

“Oh. Here are your grandparents. They’re going to want to poke you and tell you lies about me. We’re just going to have to put up with it.” 

Albion was already bored with my parents. He didn’t even bother opening his eyes when I opened the door. 

My parents stood side by side, getting ready to stare at me like they did when I was sent home from school for burning down one of the science labs, which had been an accident. (And it was for the best. The science labs were hopelessly dated, and losing one provided a very handsome insurance payment that meant that all four junior labs were rebuilt and updated. I waited six years for a thank you and got nothing.) 

Mr and Mrs Holmes’ painful, passive aggressive disapproval melted before Albion. My mother clasped her hands together and my father took him off me immediately. 

I made Mycroft make the tea. 

I sat with my father on the couch and watched him hold my son: Father had baby confidence but it was rusty. My mother sat next to him and looked like she was going to snatch Albion away as soon as we stopped paying attention. 

She said the same thing over and over. “Sherlock, he’s beautiful! Look at all that hair!” And then, to my father, “Give him here. You’ve had him long enough. He wants to sit with me.” 

They had, for the first time in living memory, surprised me. I honestly expected them to be more interested in berating me than holding Albion. Instead they spent their entire visit taking photographs and working out ways to steal him from each other. My mother won, but that is because she is more wily than my father. Also, my father defers to her continuously. 

“He looks so much like you as a baby,” my father said on the second occasion he managed to get Albion from my mother. And then, unprompted, he said, “You were the loveliest little baby. We were all so happy when you came home.”

That statement, coming from my father, is akin to any emotionally healthy person writing you a sonnet. 

“I thought Mycroft bit me.” 

“I did,” Mycroft called from the kitchen, “But not in a nasty way. You just looked so soft and chewy.” 

My mother rolled her eyes, mouthed HE WAS JEALOUS at me in a very theatrical way and then set about leaning over my father so she could snatch Albion back. 

Then she surprised me even more. 

“You know Sherlock, I always thought you’d make a wonderful father.” 

“Now you’re just mocking me.”

She shook her head, eyes on the prize the whole time. “Babies need constant attention, and they’re totally unpredictable. You’re at your best when you have your attention engaged constantly. A baby is the perfect foil for you.” 

Mummy gave me her warmest, kindest smile, the one I get only when I’ve been exceptionally impressive. “And just look at this little sweetheart. He couldn’t be better cared for.” 

 

“Mummy’s right.” My father was reluctantly being relieved of Albion. “I’m astounded at how well you’re coping, especially in such odd circumstances.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Mycroft told us all about the mother, poor little girl.” 

Having the two most impossible-to-please people in the British Isles make those declarations was very overwhelming. I was glad that my carnivorous brother appeared with the teapot. 

“It wasn’t a bad bite,” Mycroft said as he daintily poured the tea. 

My father remembered it differently. “Actually it was. You had a great big red ring on your cheek for days.” 

“Is Albion a good sleeper?” Mummy wanted to know. 

“So far,” although I wasn’t sure what a good sleeper was. “He wakes about every four hours.” 

Then my mother wanted to know all about the formula and whether I’ve played the violin for him yet. (I haven’t, mostly because he’s in my arms roaring at the times when it would be most beneficial. Maybe when he ‘s a little older.)

My father asked if I’d bring Albion home next time Aunty Patty was visiting. “She’s got three grandchildren and they’re all ugly. I want to show her what a proper grandchild looks like.” 

(Aunty Patty is my father’s twin. She is famous in my family for having twinsets in every conceivable colour and being insufferable. I have never heard her and Father speak with or about one another fondly. Nor have I seen her grandchildren although it is without query that Albion is infinitely more attractive.)

My mother was nodding. “He really is the prettiest baby, and I’m not just saying that because he’s ours.” 

It apparently became too much and Albion started roaring at me for making him sit through all this sentiment. “Ooooh!” said my mother, “Someone’s got a wet nappy!” My father leaned back and folded his arms as my wailing son was promptly handed back to me. 

***

I never thought I would have cause to say this, but it was the most pleasant period I had ever spent with my family. Granted, that’s not really saying very much because we never have pleasant times together. Which is odd, because we actually are very fond of each other.

Families are strange. People talk about dysfunctional families as if they’re an unusual or avoidable phenomenon but I don’t actually know of a functional one. 

After my family left, I settled Albion down for the afternoon and made him a promise: that he would know, every day of his life, how much his father loved him, and not, some time in his thirties, have to guess that maybe he might.


	24. Chapter 24

Babies are not straightforward. They actually arrive with little personalities all ready to go, and you have to get to know them. I had no idea. Until I met Albion, I thought they were just little unformed transports that developed personalities as they grew. 

They’re actually like little flatmates. They have expectations and requirements, and they take up a lot of space. In fact, adult flatmates are actually much easier to live with, largely because they can tell you what they want or explain how you’re disappointing them. Babies require you to deduce. 

*** 

As we got to know each other, my boy and I settled into our own routine.

Albion slept in the lounge room, and I slept when he did, right next to him, on the couch. He wasn’t much interested in sleeping regularly or for any length of time, just like me. 

 

Sometimes he didn’t want to sleep. I know that feeling. When he was uninterested in sleeping he liked to cry so I would talk to him to calm him down. My success rate was about 40 per cent. 

I like to think he liked the sound of my voice, so I would tell him stories or talk to him non-stop about things I thought would be helpful to him as well as interesting. I would hold him when I told these stories, which was pleasant for him because it was warm and comfortable, and pleasant for me because he was as light as a cloud and I could watch all the different expressions he could make. 

Snow White had been one of my favourite stories when I was little (mostly because of the Woodsman, but also because the poison apple is actually brilliant and very effective) so I used that story very early on.

After the stress of meeting his grandparents, Albion roared at me on and off for hours with his lovely little red mouth, which interested me enormously because he had no teeth, but I knew there teeth just below the surface, waiting to pop up like crocus do at the end of winter. I looked into his little mouth for probably too long, and then I told him a story. 

“I’m going to tell you about Snow White. She was a very beautiful princess who lived with her beautiful but nasty stepmother. The stepmother had a talking mirror, which is the kind of things ladies in fairy stories often have. 

“She used to ask the mirror if she was the prettiest person in the kingdom and the mirror, who actually didn’t see many people, always told her yes. That was until Snow White grew up and started looking in the mirror, so obviously the mirror had a point of comparison, which is also the basis of quantative research. 

“So the mirror started telling the wicked stepmother that Snow White was prettier. The wicked stepmother was an idiot, so she told her Woodsman to take Snow White into the forest and kill her, and bring back her heart as proof of her death. Although in real life, the wicked stepmother would have done it herself. I’ve seen several murders by stepmothers, and they have all been very capable murderesses and not all that wicked on first meeting.”

Adrian yelled at me more loudly for digressing just as he was getting interested. 

“Apologies. Now, the Woodsman was a very honourable man. He gave his service to the Queen – that’s the stepmother – quite faithfully, and when she told him to murder the little girl, he just nodded and took the little girl to the forest. 

“But don’t get frightened. The Woodsman had a very good heart, and once they got to the woods he told the Snow White to run away, because he knew there were some little people – dwarves is the archaic medical term for their condition – who lived in a cottage on the other side of the woods. 

“Then the Woodsman went looking for a boar, which is a fairly fearsome kind of pig thing, but you don’t have to be frightened because there aren’t any boars in London and if there was, and it came here, Mrs Hudson would hit it with a broom and if it still got upstairs, I’d kill it and you’d be safe. 

Albion started to quieten a little, so I deduced he was interested in culling boars.

“So the Woodsman killed the boar and cut out its heart which would have involved a sternectomy – you know, when you actually saw open the breastbone – and then he would have had to cut though the arteries to release the heart. It would have taken him fifteen minutes, at least. Twenty if it was dark. 

“Then the Woodsman took the heart home to the wicked stepmother, who was an even bigger idiot we initially thought, because obviously a little girl’s heart would have been smaller than a boar’s heart. Unless of course the Woodsman trimmed it somewhat.”

Albion was now looking at me carefully, apparently thinking about the skill required to trim a heart. 

“You’re right. The heart is in fact a muscle and made of very dense fibre. The Woodsman would need to have a steady hand. John Watson could trim a heart. He is a doctor and a soldier and my best friend. If there were boars in London, and John Watson has come home, you won’t ever have to worry about being attacked or indeed anything because he will fight to the death to protect you. 

“He would have done the same thing as the Woodsman. He would have helped the Snow White run away. Actually, he would have walked through the woods with the Snow White, got her to the cottage, made sure the washing up was done, folded all the washing and made her some toast. Then he would have waited for the dwarves to come home and threatened all of them with his gun to ensure no harm came to Snow White. 

“You will love John Watson, if he ever comes home. He had a little baby too, a girl baby called Ollie who Social Services came and took from him because his wife was – well, she was wicked. Worse than any stepmother. It was her fault they took Ollie away. I didn’t realise how bad that would be until I held you. When you have a baby, the last thing you want is for someone to take it from you. It made John Watson very heartsick, and he waited with me in hospital because his wife shot me, and then he had to take a very long walk to get better. He’s still walking. 

“I don’t think he’s better yet. He’s sending postcards to all our friends so that I know he’s alright. One day he might send one to me and when he does I’ll know he’s better and that he’s coming home. You’ll love him as soon as you meet him. He’ll teach you to fire a gun, when you’re older obviously, and to cull boars, if you really want to do that kind of thing.”

Albion was asleep now, no doubt because he was reassured that John Watson was coming home. I reduced my voice to a whisper as I carefully lay him on his little blankets. 

“The moral of the story is don’t get a stepmother, which you don’t have to worry about because I’ll never bring home a stepmother. The other, more important moral is to trust the Woodsman with your life because he’ll keep you safe.

“Oh, and I just remembered that I didn’t tell you why they called her Snow White but you’re asleep now. Still. The Queen – the real one, not the fool who couldn’t stop staring at her self in the mirror – pricked her finger and dripped some blood on the snow, and told the air that she wanted a daughter just like that – white and red. Which is ridiculous. 

“Also the step mother did end up poisoning Snow White but she got better and married some clown in pantaloons. When you read the book, it will tell you that they lived happily ever after but that isn’t actually what happily ever is. 

“Happily ever after is lots of other things. I tell you about it some day. When you’re awake.” 

Albion slept soundly, but thinking about happily ever after actually kept me awake until the next feed.


	25. Chapter 25

Detective Inspector Lestrade had organised for blood samples to be taken at St Barts. Lestrade had, while making this arrangement, spoken to Molly, and also explained to her how I obtained a profoundly beautiful baby boy. This spared me not inconsiderable grief. I hate disappointing Molly. 

It was fitting that Albion’s first ever excursion would be to St Bart’s, where I spend a lot of time using the forensics lab and, more importantly, where I first met John Watson. 

Some people say you can fall in love with another at first sight but that has never happened to me, so I can’t confirm it as a definite. I didn’t fall in love with John Watson immediately; it was a slow process, like fermentation. 

I was, however, enlightened at first sight when I first saw John Watson, by which I mean my entire outlook became brighter because he brought light to my occasionally bleak world. Also, he wasn’t remotely fazed by me, which was maddingly attractive. 

*** 

Our first outing necessitated some very thorough research. Babies, I learnt, don’t travel lightly. The mothers’ websites (all of which are run with the precision of battle ships and overseen by the most fearsome women on the planet) had advised me that I needed to take quite a few things. It was like going on a small holiday. 

I quiver to think what the women of the mothers’ net do to you if you don’t follow the rules. 

Albion wore a very attractive and warm one piece jump suit. There were trains on the arms. I’d added a hat and little knitted shoes that actually looked like socks. I didn’t have any mittens for him, but I did have an excellent sleeping bag that zipped up and made him look exactly like cricket larvae. 

He was very handsome for his first outing. 

I wore a navy suit that toned nicely against his sleeping bag. 

I don’t ever carry a bag so it was disconcerting to be starting at this late age. I couldn’t see how I would end up using all of the equipment in the bag but figured it was probably better to lug the stuff all over London than to risk word getting back to the Mothers’ website. They frightened me enormously and I’m not frightened of anyone. 

St Bart’s is only ten minutes walk from my flat so we got to test-drive the pram, which everyone we passed peered in, mostly because it was being pushed by a man and men with prams interest people. 

Some people smiled at us, others were suspicious. 

Molly was pleased to see me but, I deduced, not entirely happy with the way things had turned out. I was unable to deal with any aspect of that so pretended it wasn’t happening. 

She crouched down before the pram. “Hello little Albion!” 

He ignored her completely, and stayed hidden in his little sleeping bag. 

Mike Stamford – who I have deduced to be admiring of Molly from a far for many years – was sitting at the bench. I have known Mike for years too. We’re not friends but I love him dearly because he introduced me to two medical degrees Watson. They had been students together and more recently were known to go to the pub together to watch Rugby games. 

(I was never invited to these outings because Three Pints Are Enough Watson believed I didn’t like the pub. Which is flagrantly untrue. I would take a seat next to John Watson in hell if it meant I had his full attention.)

Mike’s an interesting man, entirely dull in most ways but a very effective talker. He will make five or six pertinent points in a few brief sentences. I like this because it saves time. 

Today he was all wide smiles and good intentions.

“Hello Sherlock! Molly tells me you had a baby. Noisy little buggers, aren’t they? Funny I should you see you today. I‘ve just got a postcard from our friend Dr Watson. Would you like to have a look?” 

I wanted to smash all the lab benches to get to the postcard. 

John Watson was writing from Melbourne. He was staying in a caravan park with a former army buddy and about to make his way to the lip of the Pacific Ocean, and then to Tasmania for no adequately explored reason, and then to the Antarctic Research Base where his buddy had worked for a year. My envy and loathing of the army buddy could not be quantified. 

I had a mental picture of Dr Watson making all the cold scientists cups of tea and taking photographs of the outsize penguins they have down there. Outsize penguins would interest Dr Watson. I would offer good money at competitive odds that he helps a few of them make their nests. 

The picture on the postcard was of a nondescript building that was apparently a pub in the centre of Melbourne. It appears Dr Watson enjoyed the local beer there. I studied the pen strokes carefully but there was still no sign that he was coming home. 

“Can I have this?” I asked Mike. 

He shrugged. “Sure. Some people collect postcards. Can I have a look at your baby?” 

It seemed like a fair exchange. Mike held Albion briefly, long enough for me to observe that he had baby confidence too. 

Meanwhile the nurse turned up with a butterfly needle. I winced. 

“Scared of needles?” she smirked. 

I wanted to tell her that I had been beaten senseless by Serbian criminals wielding chains threaded with nails and was still able to recall the colour and shape of John Watson’s eyes as they flailed me so no, a small blood withdrawal didn’t faze me. But I was conscious too that people might want to take my baby from me if I appeared to b aggressive or hostile, so I answered as civilly as I could. 

“I’m scared for my son,” I said as smoothly as I could while Mike handed him back over.

The nurse was unsympathetic. “Oh, he’ll be fine. Babies don’t know enough to be scared and they can barely feel it.” 

Albion disagreed strongly with this. He roared endlessly. What kind of moron are you, he bellowed at me, letting this harridan drive a needle into my arm? She’s stealing my BLOOD, you imbecile. 

It was distressing. I kissed his little face and said shush, shush, it’s nearly over but inside I was howling with him.

The nurse was satisfied with the little tube of blood, holding up to the light as if she expected to see spiders floating there. I wanted to snatch it from her immediately but had to watch calmly as she handed it to Molly, who slipped it respectfully in a little bag so it could go to the path lab downstairs. 

Mike, not Molly, took my blood. “I don’t get enough practice!” he said with his hearty laugh. He was right – it took him three jabs to pierce my scarred vein. 

While Mike stabbed me, Molly held Albion, resplendent in his first band aid (it had Pooh Bear on it). She spoke to me about her latest boyfriend whose name is either Francis, Phillip, Felix or Peter, but I was thinking simultaneously about my son’s safety in Molly’s arms and about a student John Watson learning to take blood with Mike Stamford twenty years ago. A Young Watson would have had the same laugh and the same smile but his hair would have been brighter and his trust would have been in tact and his heart unblemished in those early days. 

For a second I ached for all the agony John Watson had to endure over the last twenty years. 

“He’s very beautiful, Sherlock,” Molly said as she carefully handed my son back. Albion had calmed down now and still had his dreamy little eyes open, waiting patiently for me to do something else that would make him cry. 

Molly put my blood in the same bag as Albion’s. I took a photo on my phone of our blood side by side and have made it my wallpaper.


	26. Chapter 26

Babies are so helpless. This is one of their big selling points, in my opinion. They give you no reason to have any expectation of them and just when you have grown to understand the extent of their helplessness, they start doing things.  
That’s why every parent is convinced their child is a prodigy. 

It’s an exceptionally clever way to keep parents enthralled.

Albion’s first act of brilliance was, at eight days old, to stare, transfixed, at the rather dated, quasi-Victorian wallpaper in my flat. I knew his sight was still very limited, but I knew too that the thing he could see most clearly was distinct contrasting patterns (my wallpaper is a black fleur de lys on a beige background). 

I was amazed to see him notice something. Now we have wallpaper time every day. 

His second act of brilliance was in the bath. He hated his first few baths, was indifferent to the next few, and after about ten days he seemed a little more relaxed when I slipped my hand under his fuzzy head and sluiced him. Then, at twelve days, I watched him actually taste the water as I carefully poured a small cup of warm water over his hair. 

I was delighted. He had deduced that he was in an element different from air, and he sought to discover what the element tasted like. I was convinced he was a genius, but only because until that point he couldn’t do anything unaided at all, except stare at wallpaper. 

He was teaching me too, just when I thought I knew everything there was nothing else to know about people. 

After the breakthrough bath, I balanced my harpoon on two chairs and watched the clutch reflex of his feet. He was tired, yawning (and if there is anything prettier than a yawning baby, I haven’t seen it) but quite happy to stand on the metal pole as I held him carefully. His feet curled around it beautifully, just like the apes from which we descend. (We lose that reflex at about six weeks and are fit only for flat horizontal surfaces forever.)

He has long legs too. I’ve calculated that if he grows at the normal rate, he should attain a full height of six foot one. 

One of my greatest fears is boredom. More than a few hours of not having a case can drive me to unadulterated madness. Now I can watch my son actually grow. Every single second imprints another piece of information on his rapidly expanding brain.

So I try to provide as wide range of experiences as I can: I have two different kinds of scented baby wash, I let him sleep on my bed, on my chest, on the floor on pillows and blankets, I talk to him about different things in different tones of voice so that his brain absorbs and stores as much varied information as possible. 

 

(And every minute that I’m with Albion, and with everything I teach him, I think of how it must have been for John Watson when they took Ollie from his arms. All the things he had taught her already, everything she had learnt from him. How desperately she must have missed him those first few nights. She would have cried for him and he would have known that, and known that her heart was breaking when he didn’t come. How torturous for him as he counted the days, knowing that with each one she was forgetting him more and more, until the time that, if they met again, she would just stare blankly at him. The agony.) 

 

***

Mycroft was pacing around my flat burping Albion, who was peering at me reproachfully over his uncle’s shoulder. I was sterilising bottles in the kitchen, which is an extremely satisfying thing to do. I’ve planned a number of uses for the sterilising contraption when Albion’s need for bottles has expired. 

The blood tests had confirmed that we were irrefutably (to 0.0001% probability) father and son so Mycroft had started dropping in every morning to get a head start on annoying Albion for the rest of his life. 

“Now Sherlock. I’ve been speaking with Galveston Lestrade and he’s been trying to find Albion’s mother.” 

This made me quite cross. “Why do we need to find Albion’s mother?” 

“Because she’s his mother and she might be in some kind of peril.” 

“The only thing she’s in is a crack house. She’s an addict, Mycroft. She knows where I am and she knows I have Albion here. She saw me buying furniture for him. She can come back whenever she likes.” 

“I want to be certain that she is healthy and aware of her rights as Albion’s mother.” 

“She doesn’t care about her rights as Albion mother. She never even held him.” 

Mycroft turned around so all I could see was the back of Albion’s head and the delicate soles of his perfect marshmallow feet. He had the tiniest speck of nail on each toe. I have kissed each one countless times. 

“She sounds particularly troubled to me, Sherlock, and I want to be certain that she is not in any danger, or in need of medical assistance.” 

“Why do we have to find her?” 

Mycroft hitched Albion slightly higher over his pinstriped shoulder and gave me his grave, sneering look. I’ve told him many times he should have it patented. 

“Are you afraid? First Redbeard, then Dr Watson, now perhaps your son all being taken from you?” 

It was like a spear through my ribs. I am ordinarily very adept at masking my feelings and reactions, but that question cut so deeply that I felt the blood drain from my face. My bloodless brother had once again gone, quite literally, to the heart of the matter. 

“So caring, even for my son, is a disadvantage? Jesus, Mycroft. Could you not even pretend to have some empathy?” My voice hitched when I spoke. 

I knew he would be sorry immediately. Mycroft is intolerable in many ways but he is not malevolent. 

He took a couple of steps towards me.

“Oh, Sherlock, forgive me. That was unspeakably callous. I had no right to say that.” 

The problem was, Mycroft with his razor precision and icy logic was entirely correct. I was terrified that Albion might be taken from me. His guardianship was unresolved. I knew nothing about his mother, other than she liked using drugs and wore a lot of earrings. She could show up any time and make a claim, and I know who is favoured by the courts in custodial disputes. 

Mycroft continued to be conciliatory. “I regret that I ever thought that, let alone said it to you.” 

“You’re right, of course.” 

Albion burped again. He had no interest in this topic at all and found us both ridiculous. I gave Mycroft a cloth to protect his suit from any little puddles of vomit that might arise. 

“My intention here is to ensure that you don’t lose our darling Albion. If we just pretend she’s disappeared, we could be creating dreadful problems. Far better to sort it out now, rather than have her turn up in a few months’ time and cause all kinds of heartbreak and confusion.” 

The wound still throbbed, but my preposterous brother was completely right on that point too. Just the thought of sharing my little boy in some kind of three days on, three days off arrangement made me feel physically ill. 

“Has Lestrade found her?” 

“He’s spoken to her sister.” 

“And?” 

“Her sister says she’s an addict who stayed with her while she was pregnant, disappeared for four days, and then returned home not pregnant three weeks ago, claiming to have sold the baby to a dentist and his wife in Brighton. Then she disappeared again.” 

A dentist? For a moment I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t disclose Albion was with his father. Then I remembered to eighty thousand pounds. 

“So she’s provided a good alibi for the money.” 

“Well, a passable alibi.” 

“Anything else?” 

“Only that her name’s not Adrienne, and she’s actually twenty five.” 

“What’s her real name?” 

“Oddly enough, it’s Mary.” 

Mycroft made a sort of sympathetic face at me, which would have been effective had Albion not belched again quite loudly.


	27. Chapter 27

Next to John Watson, Albion was the most fascinating person I had ever met. Everything my baby did interested me, particularly his methods of communication.

He had a series of faces to relay different emotions and requirements. A tiny, pouting lip meant he was genuinely sad and wanted me to hold him while simultaneously pacing the floor and telling him something interesting. A small frown met he was about to wail because he wanted his pants changed immediately. Raising his little fists meant he was frustrated and about to cry because I wasn’t holding him and providing him with comforting body warmth. Closed eyes and a still face meant he had just drunk another two hundred millilitres of formula and wanted to sleep, preferably in my arms while I reclined. 

Most of his communications were relayed via some form of anguish, so it was a pleasant surprise when he communicated to me in an entirely different way. 

I was changing his nappy, which sometimes meant I had to all but hose him down (what was going on in that tiny little gut that he produced so much wind and excreta?) and then I’d polish him off with a baby wet wipe thingy. 

On his thirty third day, he had been grizzling, not dramatically like he sometimes does but just enough to keep me on my toes, while I cleaned him up. 

“Yes,” I told him in my special love voice, “It’s all very well for you to be snivelling but I’m the one actually dealing with it from this side, Mr Uber Guts.” 

He stopped grizzling and looked at me, like I had said some thing interesting. 

“You heard me,” I continued with a soft goofy voice so he’d know I didn’t mind. “I’m the one who has to clean it all up.” 

And he smiled at me. 

He smiled! He had no teeth and his hair wouldn’t sit down no matter how much I smoothed it and he smelt funny and it was still the most glorious thing I could have imagined. 

The first thing I wanted to do was call John Watson, who would have understood instantly the gravity of this breakthrough. 

In the absence of John Watson, I became the very kind of person I despised for nearly two minutes – one entirely enchanted and influenced by fleeting moments of sentimentality. I sent pictures to Mycroft, Lestrade and Molly. I even thought about starting a Facebook account to post pictures there, but that urge only lasted about four seconds. 

Then I called Mrs Hudson. She came running up like she did the time Moriarty blew up the flat with gas cylinders, hoping for the worst, because no one appreciates a proper drama like Mrs Hudson. 

“What’s the matter?” she yelped as she ran through the door. 

“Look!” 

She rushed over to us and waited while I tried to get him to do it again. He stared at me with his special you’re-an-idiot look then started to cry because I was unable to keep a secret. 

“He smiled,” I told Mrs Hudson weakly, but she didn’t believe me. 

“I think he’s too young to smile, Sherlock.” She was being nice – Mrs Hudson is never anything less than nice, and quite frequently more – and a little annoyed at being disturbed while she was watching Steel Magnolias. 

 

“Sorry to drag you away from Steel Magnolias,” I mumbled while I gently jiggled my non-smiling baby. 

“It’s no problem, Sherlock. Oh! Hello! Can I help you?” 

A tall, pale, soberly dressed woman with a pudding bowl haircut stood at my open door. I have no idea how she got in until I looked behind her and saw Mycroft strolling up the stairs, smirking at his phone. 

“I am Anya,” the pudding bowl woman said. “This must be Albion.” 

“Ah Sherlock,” Uncle Myc sang. “Mrs Hudson! So lovely to see you. How’s your hip?” 

“Oh, you know,” she said, although none of us actually did, “I can’t complain. “ She then turned her attention to Pudding Bowl Lady. “Anya, was it?” I’m Martha Hudson. Nice to meet you.” 

“Hello and it is nice to meet you,” said Anya without a hint of a smile. “I am the new nanny.”


	28. Chapter 28

I knew Mycroft would find a nanny, and I knew she would be competent, but I thought she would be one of those central casting nannies in a starched apron carrying a large carpet bag. 

Anya was a East German born citizen who boasted a PhD in aeronautical engineering and had, for a time, been a member of the Stasi. 

Since moving to London, she has worked as a nanny. She likes the lack of paperwork. 

Anya was an interesting person. I deduced that she was 55, shopped at Next and Jaeger, had three children (one of whom had died), was a vegetarian, divorced, skyped with her family three times a week, cooked a lot of stews and casseroles, ran regularly and smoked a pipe. 

Mycroft organised for her to be housed in 221c, the flat down stairs in my building that no one would ever rent. The flat had been furnished over the last couple of days. If I had been focusing on anything other than my son, I might have noticed delivery men coming and going. 

“It’s lovely to meet you, Anya,” I told her over Albion’s head. “I won’t be requiring your services at all.”

“Certainly. It is as your brother has told me. I have been instructed to ignore everything you say regarding my employment here. Now I will gather the washing and restore straightness to the apartment.” 

And off she went. Mycroft sat himself down on the couch and held out his arms. 

“Albion, come and sit with Uncle Mycroft so your fetid father can have a shower.” 

Anya was apparently rebuilding my kitchen if the clattering she caused was any indication. I deposited Albion with Mycroft, considered starting an argument with him about the nanny but deferred because it was actually brilliant to have some one to assist, and also I hadn’t had a shower for two days.


	29. Chapter 29

Having a nanny turned out to have many benefits, most of them for me: I got to have a shower every day and had time to enjoy the quotidian details - make a cup of tea, take telephone calls, work out some things I could do with the bottle steriliser when Albion didn’t need it any more.

Better still, things got done. I had clean clothes again because Anya washed and ironed everything, and there was milk in the fridge. The flat looked a little like it did when six striped shirts Watson lived here. 

It also meant I could resume my work on the cold files. It took a bit of practice, not to jump up when the crying started. It was also very hard to hear him settle down when Anya fed him. That someone else could soothe him made sharp little spikes of yearning form in my chest. 

She started work at about 9am every morning, after Albion and I had discussed the day’s plans over breakfast. While he slept she did whatever housework needed doing, and I would let her go at 4pm every day. I didn’t want to be one of those bosses you read about in the Daily Mail who treat their staff badly. 

I only saw her during the day; I have no idea what she did outside seven hours she spent with us. That said, I note that she grew quite chummy with Mrs Hudson, and often heard peals of laughter wafting up from Mrs Hudson’s flat in the evening. Their shared hilarity was curious. I wondered what entertained them, because Anya and I were not able to make each other laugh.

Albion being so close made it easier to get back to work. It meant I could, whenever I wished, take a break and go look at his fat pink sleepy countenance, or count the number of breaths he would take every fifteen seconds, or circle his warm, soft knee with my thumb and index finger.

Mycroft turned out to be one hundred per cent right about the nanny and made insufferable, smug faces me at every available opportunity for weeks. I hate him when he’s right, but also really do love my brother when he uses his powers for good and not evil. 

*** 

Anya settled in very quickly. She was incredibly efficient and held curious views on a range of topics. 

“Mr Albion should have his own room soon. You have a spare room up the stairs and he would be happy in there with his privacy.“

“He’s six weeks old. I change his pants for him. We have no secrets.” 

“Yes but everyone needs their own room. It is important for a cohesive society.” 

She also wanted me to eat stew for breakfast, which was a task beyond my physical capabilities. I like to start the day with hot liquids (tea) and move on to something small and starchy (toast, although I am partial to a small bowl of oats and brown sugar sometimes) about thirty minutes after tea. 

“You are needing to have blood food in the morning or you won’t awaken correctly,” Anya warned me. “Stews are good for the blood.” 

The notion made me bilious. “I can’t eat stew for breakfast. It goes against the grain of my cultural identity.” 

“You must learn. You will find yourself nourished by both the good food and the privilege of having good food.” 

That sounded like something a despotic ministry of food would say to brainwash its citizens. Where did Mycroft find this odd woman? I suspected Anya had met Mycroft through an intelligence network and asked her quite casually one day when she was feeding Albion. 

“Did you ever work with MI6?” 

She flashed me her rare, very straight wide smile. “You brother instructed me that, if you were to be asking that question, I was to tell you to mind your own business.” 

 

Living with a very strict and efficient nanny enabled us to settle into a routine. Albion and I had breakfast together and after I finished files for the day, we’d take a walk together. I liked the exercise out in the heart of London, and Albion liked being held close under my coat. I would stop when ever I found something brightly coloured that he might enjoy looking at, and for any animals, because I wanted him to know as soon as possible that we are just one animal amongst a whole range of species. When we got home he’d have a bath, taste the water, then slurp one last bottle before bed. 

Anya moved our base from the couch into the bedroom. It made sense, because my room was quieter and darker, which she insisted was more conducive for sleep. She quoted research on circadian cycles, with which I am not in full agreement . But it was quieter, and I concede we enjoyed a better quality of rest there.

I loved listening to his tiny breaths in the dark and I loved his little cry at three in the morning. Those early morning feeds were magic, just the two of us alone in a dark world. Sometimes I wished we could stay like that forever.


	30. Chapter 30

From this point the days started to become more varied, and Albion’s growth started to become quite significant. He stopped being a new born, and became a young baby, about to join that snappy 3 – 6 month old age group who I saw described so frequently on websites and baby products. 

I missed his tiny helplessness, but marvelled at his growing competencies. In any case, I had memorised every millimetre of him, and have, in my mind palace, a complete gallery of Albion at every stage of his life that I can visit whenever I miss him. 

 

***

Detective Inspector Lestrade made a point of dropping by weekly, ostensibly to check on the cold cases but in reality to see me doing something related to parenting. He was a little like those people who stand at pet shop windows and watch mice run in wheels. 

When Albion was nine weeks old, he came with some important news. 

“I still can’t get over the fact the fact you’re a father”, he told me for twenty first time. (I was keeping count. I intended to call a halt to his exclamations of amazement when he reached fifty.) 

I was changing Albion’s nappy. I’d bought him some new nappy covers from a brilliant firm in London who will make designs to your specifications. 

“I can’t imagine why. You must have met countless people less equipped to parent than me.” 

“I suppose. Look, I have to – hang on, does his nappy match the wallpaper?” 

“Yes.” 

“Why?” 

“He likes the wallpaper. It was one of the first things that he noticed.” 

Albion chose that moment to gurgle at us both. Lestrade leaned in and gently tickled his little grape sized chin. 

“You’re going to be a picture of sartorial elegance, just like your old man,” he told him sweetly. 

“That’s certainly my intention.” 

“Only you would have a kid that matches the décor. But look, I’ve got to talk to you about social services.” 

My worst nightmares, it appeared, were about to come true. 

“I’ve been told you’re going to get a visit.” 

“Why?” 

“You have a history of drug use, and Albion’s mother has a criminal record for possession. They flagged you both when he was born.“ 

“Flagged us?” 

“Every hospital notifies social services if they think the child might be at risk. Two drug using parents are a fairly standard reason for a flagging.” 

I concentrated on securing tabs and making sure Albion was comfortable in his clean pants. “When?” I asked casually. 

“I don’t know. It will be a surprise visit.” 

“How do you know they’ll visit?” 

“I have friends in lots of departments and different government agencies. I’d asked one to let me know if she heard anything concerning you.” 

I deduced Lestrade had a friend in Social Services, which would be highly likely, given he dealt with them whenever he oversaw a homicide involving a child. On that basis I had to accept his information was sound. 

“What should I do?” 

“Everything you’re doing now. Look after your son. Keep the flat clean. And when they turn up, don’t try to lord it over them. They have a job to do. Just tell them what they ask.” 

“What are they looking for?” 

“Signs of drug use in you, signs of neglect or physical abuse in Albion.” 

I hated to ask the next question but I had no choice. “Can they take him off me?” 

“If they think he’s in immediate danger, yes. But that’s the theory. In my opinion, just looking at him now in his fancy nappy and fat as a fool, I’d say not a chance.” 

I had Albion, sweet smelling and quite content, tucked in under my chin. He was making tiny little noises for his own entertainment. A wave of anguish came over me, that someone might take him away, even for a few hours until I could get Mycroft to pull out all stops. 

Lestrade saw how worried I was. “Don’t let it upset you. Just be prepared. You’re a great parent. No one doubts that.”


	31. Chapter 31

“How is Anya faring?” 

Mycroft was sitting the old brocade seat that was once John Watson’s on a Sunday afternoon, feeding Albion. I was stretched out on my couch, reading the woefully inadequate police brief prepared for the disappearance of a school boy in 1993. It was making me uncomfortable.

“Remarkably well. She prefers to work unsupervised, which suits me, because I prefer not to supervise her.”

“Does Albion like her?” 

“He hasn’t said he doesn’t, so I’m assuming that he does.” 

It was obvious that Mycroft was wondering when I might start working cases again. 

“I thought I might ask Lestrade for a case in a couple of weeks. Something short to start, and only during the day.” 

“You’re going to have to choose your cases more carefully now, at least for a couple of years.” 

“How so?” 

Mycroft lifted his arms slightly to present Albion to me. “You can’t afford to break a limb or get shot anymore. Not when this young man is relying on you to feed him at two in the morning.” 

*** 

As it turned out, I got my first case the following week. 

It was odd to be in a suit, and odd to be among very familiar people who were all looking at me strangely because they could not fathom how I became a father. 

The case was a robbery-murder, wherein the owner of a very small jewellery store near Lewisham had been punched very hard and fractured her skull when she fell. A few rings and brooches – sparkly, semi precious things that could be sold easily in a pub – had been stolen. 

The owner died before help arrived. 

It was relatively straightforward case. I thought weeks of attending a small noisy person with no teeth and an indifference to personal hygiene might have scrambled my brain, but to my surprise I had no trouble gathering the information and making deductions, and was able to sustain a mental image of Albion at the same time, so I was certain I was ready to resume work. 

After I’d looked at the crime scene (the man they wanted had been a customer before, needed money urgently (probably a bad debt), was acquainted with the victim and did not mean to kill her), I was approached by a number of police officers I knew by sight, all of whom wanted to see pictures of my baby. 

I gave them the expurgated version – the shots of his feet, hands, his perfect rosy mouth and a couple of photos of him smiling. 

Sally Donovan, a sergeant who mostly wishes me dead or imprisoned, was most appreciative and a bit resentful. I knew this because she didn’t say anything for a few moments. 

“So is he like you?” she asked eventually. 

I wasn’t sure what she meant. “He’s my son,” was the best I could do. 

“Yeah, I know, but is he smart like you?” 

“I hope not,” I answered. “Not that I care. I love him desperately. Everything about him, every whine, every little fart, every last thing is perfect.” 

Sally has a truly beautiful smile, all the more lovely for its rare appearances. She shared it with me now, clapped my shoulder and walked away. 

 

I left soon after. Lestrade was satisfied with my deductions and Lewisham is a long way from home. In any case, I had to get home to start preparing for tummy time.


	32. Chapter 32

It was important to me that Albion was well dressed, and I hoped that I could get him into the habit of staying well dressed. Clothing sends out very specific messages to people about how you perceive yourself and gives them clues about how they should treat you. Being clean and groomed tells people you have self esteem. Wearing clothes that fit, in flattering colours, tells people you have self respect and are in control. People treat you differently if you can project those signals. 

Albion’s wardrobe at this stage was made of lounge wear and casual day clothes. Amongst the latter I’d assembled the John Watson Collection, which included a number of striped t-shirts and some dark stretchy leggings that referenced Dr Watson’s choice in trousers. 

John Watson was famous amongst his friends and acquaintances for his large collection of jumpers. They don’t make many good jumpers for very little babies, but I was able to get some very good soft knitted cardigans. 

I haven’t bought Albion any shoes because there’s no point, given he can’t even lift his head yet. I have got him some socks though, all of which I chose because they match or compliment his jumpers. 

John dressed very much like the English military man. He wasn’t a showy dresser, but he liked good quality and his clothes suggested a gentlemanly English country estate look. It suited him very well. It suits Albion too. 

*** 

Tummy time was one of the first educational activities Albion and I enjoyed together. I had been looking forward to it for some weeks, starting with a few minutes here and there of laying him on his back. Today we were going to work towards sitting up.

I waited until Saturday morning, when I had Albion to myself. I dressed him in one of his John Watson outfits because it was a special occasion, and also because he looked delightful in a striped t-shirt. I enjoyed putting a t-shirt on him and fastening the tiny snaps on his shoulders. His little arms are like dough when I thread them through the sleeves. 

Tummy time is best undertaken on the floor, and I’d laid a yellow blanket and some towels in front of the couch. I reasoned that Albion should be seeing more colours on the spectrum wheel now and that yellow would be a nice contrast to the more subdued colours of the flat, and that he might be interested longer if I had some different texture cloths to lay on.

I had my latest notebook on hand too, because there were many aspects of tummy time that I wanted to record for future reference. 

“Oo oo,” Albion told me as he lifted him out of his day bed and settled onto the floor with him. He had just started saying vowels, always in response to my speaking clearly to him, provided I kept my face about eighteen inches from his. 

He obviously had a lot he wanted to discuss with me. 

“This very easy,” I assured him as I laid him, on his tummy, on the big blanket. “You’ve got to strengthen the muscles in your neck and shoulders so that you can hold your head up. Once you can hold your head up you can look at things when ever you want, and once you can do this, you can sit up.” 

I laid in front of him and showed him how to do it. “See? It’s that simple.” 

Easy for me to say. Albion was not enjoying tummy time yet, and started some low grade grizzling to persuade me to lay him back in the comfortable position.

“It’s much better like this,” I assured him. “Think about the times when you’ll have to lay under a truck for four hours in the cold to watch for a possible fraud suspect to emerge from a warehouse. You’ll be glad that we had tummy time then.” 

He looked at me doubtfully so I inched over just a little and slipped my finger in one his hands. 

“Start by lifting your chin up. That’s an important thing to do, especially if you’re staking an airfield at night and want to identify what kind of plane is overhead. Boeing jets and Airbuses sound very similar after they’ve attained an altitude of 7000 feet, so you need to look at them and see the placement of the engines. Should we ask Anya to teach you how to do that?” 

Albion told me oo oo again. I made a mental note to ask Anya to take Albion plane spotting. 

“You’re doing very well!” 

“Oo oo,” he said again. He wasn’t confident he could do this. 

“It’s actually very easy,” I assured him. “You’re designed to be able to do this, so you can then progress to crawling and walking.” I stretched my face up a little. “Like this. See?” 

And he slowly lifted his chin from the blanket. 

“Brilliant! Genius baby!” I leaned down and kissed the top of his fluffy head, which amused him greatly. 

The door bell rang. Mrs Hudson was on the case immediately. I could hear her talking to women, one about thirty, the other about 41 or 42. It was a formal visit, so perhaps they were clients. 

I scooped Albion up and headed to my front door, to see Mrs Hudson, unsmiling, bringing the two women to me.

“Sherlock,” she said, almost tearfully. “These ladies” – 

But the older woman interrupted. “I’m Sue Powers, and this is Alicia Briggs. I’m a case manager, and Alicia’s a social worker. We’re from London Central Social Services.”


	33. Chapter 33

There have been so many deliberate attempts on my life, and so many times when I have almost been accidentally killed, that I stopped keeping count years ago. 

I raise that trivial point to give context to the abject fear I felt when the Mesdames Powers and Briggs came into my flat. My heart was pounding and thin drools of sweat ran down my spine. It was a terror that I still can’t describe adequately. 

The ladies explained that they had been alerted by the hospital of my previous drug use and, as such, were here to see that Albion was being cared for in an environment where he could thrive. They carried documents that were signed by people who had delegated powers that enabled them, they told me plainly, to remove Albion if they thought he was in danger. 

They didn’t define danger. 

“Please take a seat,” I said in my most calm voice. 

“Not yet,” Ms Powers answered. “We’d like you to take us through the flat, room by room, to show us how you live. Is this the living room?” 

“It is.” 

“And have you been playing with your son?” 

“We’re having tummy time. I’m teaching him to lift his head.” 

“How is that going?” 

“Very well. We’ve just started.” 

“Can he lift his head yet?” 

“Not yet.” And as an afterthought, I added, “Almost,” and smiled nicely. Neither lady smiled back. 

Ms Briggs was taking furious notes. I could only make out every third word. Her penmanship was poor. 

“Where does Albion sleep?” Ms Powers wanted to know. 

I took them into my room, showed them his crib, his drawers of clothes, his small sock index (he only has six pairs, which isn’t really enough for a proper index), his nappies, his bed clothes and his Peter Rabbit bunny rug. Then I showed them the bathroom, his change table and the small inflatable bath I use to bath him on the change table. They asked if I ever left him in the bath alone or if I left him to cry. 

They obviously thought I was the worst kind of moron. 

“No. I’m with him at all times, or he’s with the nanny.” 

“Where’s his mother?” 

“She left.” 

“When?” 

“The day after he came home from hospital.” 

“So you’ve been caring for him alone?” Ms Powers was disbelieving. 

“Yes. I’ve had a nanny start in the last few weeks, though.” 

“A nanny? And how are you paying for her?” 

The thought had never occurred to me. “My brother arranged it.” 

“Does the nanny live here?” 

“She has the flat down stairs.” 

“Is she working for you full time?” 

“Um, yes. 9am to 4pm every week day.”

“And in that time, she has full care of Albie?”

“Albion. Yes, although I often stop what I’m doing to have a quick cuddle or maybe feed him.” 

“Is she a qualified nanny?” 

“No, she’s an aeronautical engineer.” 

That shut them up, at least for a few seconds. 

“Alright. But she’s now a nanny?” 

“Yes. She’s very good. I have full confidence in her with Albion.” 

“So does she prepare Albion’s bottles?” 

“One or two during the day, but mostly I do.” 

“Could you show us where you prepare the bottles?” 

It was all hideous, and certainly one of the most difficult tasks I had ever undertaken, including faking suicide with a seemingly fatal leap from a ten story building. I wanted to scream at them LOOK AROUND YOU, do you really think this baby is neglected or abused, but I heeded Lestrade’s advice and I did as I was told. Albion and I led the way to the kitchen, where they could see his bottles, the steriliser, the spreadsheet I had devised for when Albion starts solid foods and the small eating utensils I’d bought in preparation for that very interesting time. 

“Is that a human skull?” Ms Powers asked, squinting over to the mantelpiece. 

I bit my lip to stop myself lying. The texture of the bone was obvious. “Yes,” I said meekly. 

“Do you think that’s an appropriate item for a baby to look at?” 

“He doesn’t look at it,” I explained. “He likes to look at the wallpaper, and sometimes we look out the window to see if the weather is changing” - 

She cut me off sharply. “You should move that. It’s not appropriate for babies to exposed to body parts.” 

I silently thanked my stars that I had not been to seen Molly for a while and that there were no intestines in the fridge. 

They followed me back out to the lounge room and Ms Powers made some marks on a form she had on a clipboard. 

“Now I need to ask about Albion’s physical health. May I hold him for a moment, please?” 

This, I was certain, was where they would take him from me. 

Then the door bell rang again and once more Mrs Hudson answered. They were male voices this time and I thought immediately that the back-up social services people were here to take my baby boy away. 

I was staring fixedly at Ms Powers as I calculated how quickly I could run past all of them holding Albion and escape.

“His health, Mr Holmes. I need to hold him for a minute so we can check he doesn’t have any bruises or marks.” 

I automatically held him closer and my throat constricted so severely I could barely squeak. In the background I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and Mrs Hudson opened the door. 

“Sherlock!” Mrs Hudson was beaming. 

Ms Powers was now leaning in to take Albion from me. 

The first guest came in and nodded at Ms Briggs. I’m not sure I have ever been so glad to see anyone. 

“Hello. I’m Detective Lestrade from Scotland Yard. I’m an old friend of Sherlock’s, just dropped in for a visit.” 

“Inspector,” Ms Powers said quickly. “Sue Powers, Social Services.” Her arms were outstretched and she nearly had my baby. 

“What’s going on?” Lestrade asked. “You okay, Sherlock?” 

I wasn’t, not at all. Ms Powers was becoming quite insistent. “Social Services,” was all I could say. 

She moved closer. “I need to check the baby isn’t bruised or injured. I need to take him” -

And then the second guest walked in, a man with a closely trimmed beard and an unfamiliar jumper, pushing past Ms Briggs and walking straight between Ms Powers and me. He swept Albion from my arms, patting my bicep briefly and smiling straight into my eyes for a split second before he turned to address Ms Powers.

“I’m Dr John Watson. I’m Albion’s doctor. If you have any inquiries about his health you can deal with me.” 

Oh, my captain!


	34. Chapter 34

John Watson has a special smile he uses when he is about to maim or kill you. It looks like an ordinary closed lipped smile, and can be mistaken as quite friendly until you see his eyes, which will be filled with mayhem and lethal conviction. 

He was wearing that smile when he looked at both the Social Services ladies. 

Then he looked at Albion and his smile turned into another smile, the beautiful one he has for rare and very happy occasions. I hadn’t seen it for a long time and seeing it again filled me with confidence. 

No one would be taking Albion away now that Doctor Watson was here. 

“Dr Watson, was it?” Ms Powers refused to be waylaid by the terrifying doctor. “We need to be certain that Albion is healthy. Could you confirm that?” 

Albion was looking at Doctor Watson very carefully. He’d never seen a man with a beard before. “Ooo a,” he said to the doctor, and then to me, “Ooo a oo,” which I’m pretty sure was a firm appreciation of John Watson’s personal style. 

That’s John Watson! The Woodsman! I mouthed at Albion. 

“This baby is in perfect health,” John said, his eyes fixed on my son. 

Ms Powers waved a blue printed sheet at John. “I need this form ticked off.” He took it from her half-heartedly, read it briefly and then looked at me. “I’m going to have to give him a quick examination, Sherlock. Is that alright?”

“Of course.” I would have, at that moment, given John Watson my liver with unfettered compliance. 

 

*** 

I left Lestrade to talk to Ms Briggs. Mrs Hudson set about making tea, which she does with great grace during of any kind of crisis. 

Ms Powers and I stood in my bedroom, watching while John Watson very carefully lay Albion on my bed and lifted off his little t-shirt. 

Albion was still a little too young to experience anxiety at the sight of strangers, but he was nonetheless a little nervous at the prospect of his first medical examination. 

I stood behind John, where Albion could see me. The Doctor engaged his nicest bedside manner. 

“You’re a strong little bloke, aren’t you? I’m just going to have a quick feel here, under your chin.” He took Albion’s pulse and nodded as he carefully ran his fingers over the unblemished surface of his arms. 

“No marks on his arms,” the Doctor confirmed as he lifted Albion’s vest. “That’s quite a six pack you’ve got there, little man! Clear on his chest. Sit up for me, darling, I’m just going to have a look at your back. There, that’s the way. No marks on his shoulders or back.” 

Albion looked at me and gave me the pouting lip of sadness, which meant I’d failed him miserably and driven him to tears.

“Oh, I know, I know, it’s horrible having some stranger poke at you, isn’t it darling? I won’t be long.” John Watson spoke to my wailing baby with infinite tenderness. “Here, we’ll get your dad to hold you while I check your legs.” 

Ms Powers watched us both with a sour face. I deduced that she was annoyed at having been sent on a wild goose chase. 

“His legs are fine. No nappy rash?” 

“No,” I told him, “But I probably should change him, so if you need to check…” 

Albion roared louder at me for making a spectacle of him. 

“I’ll change him,” our doctor said. 

Lestrade stuck his head around the door. “Everything all right in here?” 

“Just changing his pants,” John told him. 

Lestrade looked horrified. “Whose pants?” 

“Who do you think?” 

“Oh, of course, the baby.” 

I’d hope Lestrade’s failure to keep up would mark the end of the day’s lunacy, but I’m never so lucky. On the plus side, I noted John Watson was brimming with baby confidence. 

*** 

Albion got a clean bill of health and Doctor Watson signed the blue form with a flourish. That should have been the end of the visit but Ms Powers was determined to make sure that today would not be a complete waste of time. 

“Now, I haven’t seen any toys. What kind of toys do you have for Albion?”

That was definitely going to be a score for her, because until she mentioned it, it had never occurred to me to buy him toys. 

“He’s not three months old,” I stammered. “He doesn’t play yet.” 

She went in for the kill. “Hasn’t he got any?” 

“Well, not exactly, no.” I couldn’t believe that I didn’t have any toys for him. 

Everyone went quiet, except the Woodsman. 

“What kind of things do you do together?” our Doctor asked. He seemed to be asking for himself and I was thrilled to be able to fill him in. 

“Everything! We have breakfast together, and we have a walk every day, we watch the weather changing out the window, I explain weather patterns to him, we look at the wall paper, we talk about wild boars, London transport and non-renewable fossil fuels, I tell him stories…” and then I remembered something. “The blue ducks! He’s got some plastic ducks! I’m keeping them for when he’s old enough to use a scalpel, so he can practice!” 

Everyone in the room made exactly the same face at the same time. Ms Powers looked at me with assured conviction that I should be sectioned. 

John Watson was there to save my life. As always. 

“It’s an insignificant thing,” the Doctor told Social Services. “Sherlock’s a scientist, so of course he’s not going to consider toys important.” 

“Toys are very important!” It was the first time Ms Briggs spoke. I could tell from her efficient dress and carefully styled hair that she was happy to be working on Saturday. Trouble at home, obviously. 

Dr Watson had no love for Social Services. His tone and determination to disagree illustrated he’d been harbouring a lot of hostility for quite some time. 

“Rubbish. All the toys in the world won’t help a baby to thrive. Love and care are what’s important,” the doctor snapped back. “Anyone can see that this baby is thriving on both. Toys are an optional extra. You people are unbelievable. If it’s really such a problem, I will personally go shopping with Sherlock and help him chose some toys.” 

It was not what I was hoping for our first date but beggars can’t be choosers. 

Ms Powers was sick of all of us, especially the doctor. “Fine,” she snapped back. 

Now Mycroft appeared at my door, with Anya. It appeared they’d been to brunch together. My flat was starting to take on the properties of that movie where so many are people are crammed in a small room, they all fall out when some hapless extra opens the door. 

“Sherlock! What on earth?” 

“Social Services,” I said brightly. I wasn’t worried anymore. 

“Oh. Oh! Is there a problem?” Mycroft swung his umbrella gently, which was equivalent to anyone else unsheathing their sword. 

“We’re good,” said John. 

“Doctor Watson! How wonderful to see you!” 

“Mycroft,” John said with a hint of his murdering smile. 

“This is my brother and the nanny,” I told Ms Powers.

“Hello and it is nice to meet you. I am Anya,” and turning to me, “Are these the child services?” 

“Yes.” 

“That is preposterous and a complete waste of public monies,” she said. “No children are being harmed in this flat.” 

“No, no,” said Mycroft, ever the public servant. “The public have a right to expect that their taxes fund a competent agency that will ensure child safety is a top priority.” 

Mycroft obviously wrote the brochure for that one. Meanwhile Mrs Hudson had a slightly different view. 

“Well, I want to know why we can’t have more buses. We pay enough taxes.” 

“If we’re putting our hands out for money,” Lestrade piped in, “the London Met is creaking for lack of funds at the moment.” 

“Taxes in all major European cities are unequally distributed,” Anya declared. 

It seemed we were on the brink of anarchy. I was fairly certain that nothing more could happen to me that morning, but there’s always something. Mrs Hudson rushed downstairs to answer the door again. 

It was Molly Hooper, holding a box that could have housed a small dining room table.

“Oh! Sorry Sherlock, I didn’t know you had people … actually, what is this? Am I interrupting something? Oh! John! Hello!” 

John, still holding Albion, waved awkwardly over the melee. 

“Social Services are checking on me, Molly. Please come in. Ms Briggs, Ms Powers, this is Doctor Molly Hooper. She’s my moral compass and one of Albion’s closest friends.” 

The two Social Services ladies made strained, polite faces while Molly manoeuvered a path through the political debate. 

“Hello. Hello. Sherlock, I don’t know if you’ve got one of these, only I never got you a gift when Albion was born and a friend of mine has one of these and her baby loves it and I thought little Albion might be ready for it…do you think?” 

Molly handed me the huge box. It was a baby trapeze thingy, a sort of plastic pyramid that you lay the baby under so they can grab little toys that are dangling from the frame. 

I held the box up to show the social services ladies. “He’s got toys!” 

“In an ideal society, the state should provide his toys,” Anya noted. 

I missed the social services ladies’ reaction because my attention was captured by John Watson and Albion, completely oblivious, gently tapping foreheads with each other. Albion thought this was delightful and laughed every time John leaned in. 

I caught his eye in the midst of the political unrest that was unfolding in my living room. “Welcome home,” I said with my whole heart. 

John, with both strong arms wrapped firmly around my son, gave me his beautiful smile . “Thank you. It’s so good to be back.” 

***** 

Social Services left empty handed. 

There were a lot of things to celebrate – John Watson’s return, Social Services not removing my baby, Albion’s first toy – so we ended up having a little tea party as we all set about trying to assemble Molly’s generous gift. Seasoned fathers and purveyor of toys, Lestrade and Dr Watson, led the charge while Molly unpacked the frame. I looked closely at all the components, Anya read the instruction manual and Albion watched from Mycroft’s lap. 

Mrs Hudson, who I have always maintained is the back bone of this country, was able to find two clean teapots and ensured we all had tea and biscuits. (There were Jaffa Cakes in my cupboard. I had no idea. Anya must have put them there.) 

People say that it takes a village to raise a child. It occurred to me, amongst my friends and most importantly, basking in the sunshine of John Watson, that Albion and I have been truly fortunate to end up in this village.

*** 

My entire village agreed that assembling toys is the eighth circle of hell. Nothing fits and the manual is apparently written to make the whole process as difficult as possible. 

The fathers were close to defeat. The nanny stepped in. 

Anya looked at the pieces carefully, read the manual a second time, leaned over and went click-click click and the entire frame was completed. 

“Aeronautical engineer,” I told Lestrade and the doctor, both of whom raised their eyebrows in appreciation as they attached a series of plastic fish to the frame.

The real test, though, was to see if Albion was prepared to use it. 

I had no idea how to apply him. 

“Lie him on his tummy, Sherlock,” our doctor advised. “That way he has to reach up and actually grab at the toys.” 

“Make sure he can see the toys,” Lestrade added. 

We were all quiet as I slipped him under the frame. Albion looked at me, and then watched as John Watson leaned over and gently tapped one of the dangling toys. 

“Oo,” Albion said. He was quite impressed to see the purple fish swinging, so John tapped it again. 

It was very tense for a few seconds as we waited to see just how accomplished Albion was. 

He thought about it for a few moments, and then, as if by magic, lifted himself slightly, supported himself on his left elbow and tipped his perfect face up so he could see the fish more clearly. 

We all erupted in a cheer, and he started howling at me for turning him in to a performing seal. 

“It’s all right!” I told him as I scooped him up and patted his back. 

Mycroft leaned over to take him but stopped himself short when he saw John extend his hands. 

“Do you want me to take him?” 

“Of course.” I handed him over and watched with great relief as John patted the cries down to a low level whimpering. 

Mrs Hudson said what we were all thinking. “Oh, he likes you, Dr Watson.”

*** 

It was the first gathering Albion and I had hosted together. Despite the tumultuous start, I thought it was a marvelous success.


	35. Chapter 35

After everyone had left, the doctor and I were left alone with Albion acting as to mediator. 

John had, he told me, flown back from the New York yesterday and made immediate contact with Lestrade, who provided a bed for him last night. Lestrade delivered him to my door today to ensure that there was no blood shed between us. 

That they managed to intercept Social Services was a happy co-incidence. 

The Detective Inspector had also briefed John about Albion, which saved me going through the whole tedious story about his conception again. 

I made a mental note to include the Detective Inspector on my Christmas card list, if I ever actually write one or indeed decide to send any cards. 

John kept his luggage in Lestrade’s car, because until he arrived he wasn’t certain if he would be welcomed. The luggage was now waiting in the hall downstairs after I reminded him that there was always room for him at Baker Street, and that Albion especially would love to have him stay. 

“You can sleep in your old room,” I said with no satisfaction at all. 

John Watson’s face dropped a little. “Oh. Right. Good. Thank you.” 

Then I took a good breath and put my dignity on the line. “Or you can sleep in my room with me and Albion.” 

(I made that sound quite unimportant but it was in fact an incredibly difficult thing to say. John Watson and I are not terribly competent in handling our feelings for each other. We’ve made adequate declarations once – John, when he asked me to be his best man, and me, when I gave a speech as his best man. I also told him I loved him just before he walked around he world but he couldn’t hear that, so I don’t know if it counts.

In any case, we’re British men. We have no skills for deeply felt, heart wrenching declarations. Our heritage has failed us miserably in ascertaining what is actually happening between us.)

“You don’t mind?” 

“Not at all.” I made it sound like I was lending him some tea towels. 

“Right.” 

John Watson smiled. And that was that.


	36. Chapter 36

Once the sleeping arrangements had been settled, John and I got down on the yellow rug and had some tummy time of our own. We lay opposite each other with Albion, now on his back, staring at the purple fish. 

We had a lot to discuss.

The morning’s drama had exhausted Albion. He missed his normal feed and went straight to sleep as soon as John and I started talking. 

“He’s great, Sherlock.” John was stroking Albion’s unmanageable hair. “He looks so much like you.” 

This pleased me enormously. “I know. Even his feet look like mine.” 

“I have to say, I was amazed when Greg told me.” 

“Amazed that I had sex?” 

John laughed. He has a small, soft laugh delivered with his face tipped down that he uses when he hears strange facts that he knows to be true. 

“Not so much. Amazed that you kept the baby. Although when I thought about it, I thought you of all people would be fascinated by a baby.” 

“My mother said the same thing. You’re right. He is endlessly absorbing. And now that he actually talks back – well, when I say talk – you know what I mean. But yes. He interests me continuously.” 

I watched as John tried to smooth Albion’s hair down. 

“It doesn’t sit down,” I told him. “He was born with a crest, like a cockatoo.” 

“I’ll get him some Brylcreem.” John kept stroking. “Actually, all that fluffy hair will fall out shortly, and he’ll start growing his real hair. He might have curls.” 

“His mother has dead straight hair. He might get hair like her.” 

I could feel John’s intense curiosity about the whole crack house affair rising in him like a tide. I didn’t want it to take on any artificial importance. 

“I was out of my tree for three weeks,” I explained. “I was smoking heroin and ended up sharing it with a woman I met there. We had sex, I believe, three times but I can’t remember it all. That’s the whole story of my brush with he- with her.” 

I nearly said heterosexuality. 

John Watson was being quite nonchalant. “Did you enjoy it?” 

“I have no idea. If it weren’t for the fact I have a son, I wouldn’t believe that I actually did it. I certainly didn’t go there to have sex. I just wanted to smoke heroin.” 

“You must have smoked a lot.” 

“I was high the whole time. I didn’t even know how long I’d been there when they arrested me.” 

John was still trying to smooth Albion’s soft little tufts. They sprung up like dandelions . “You know that one of the other junkies filmed it on their phone.” 

At that stage I didn’t. “Really? Why?” 

“No idea. They showed Lestrade when he was trying to track down the mother. He confiscated the phone and deleted it.” 

No aspect of that news made me feel good about myself. I was glad Albion would never know of his father’s shameful past. 

“I really should be nicer to Gawain.” 

John rolled his eyes. “Why do you do that? Why can’t you call him Greg?” 

“Because I always called him Lestrade. I never knew his name was Greg and by the time I was told, it was too late. Anyway, I think he secretly likes me calling him different names.” 

“He hates it.” 

“Ah, well. We all have our crosses to bear. Do you want to know anything more about my final drug fiesta?” 

“Final?” 

“Court order. Infant son. No more crack houses for at least sixteen years.” 

“In sixteen years’ time you’ll be too old for crack houses.” 

“And I might have more children.” 

John’s eyes became quite bright. “Seriously?” 

“I wouldn’t rule it out.” 

I wondered if John liked the idea of re-attempting fatherhood, but he can be very prickly about topics close to his heart. We were getting on so nicely I decided to let it pass. 

“You constantly surprise me. What about with Albion - are you worried that the mother will want him back?” 

“I can promise you that won’t happen. I keep telling GREG and Mycroft that she just wasn’t interested. She wouldn’t even hold him when he was born. She never fed him. She just wasn’t interested at all. She knows he’s here, and she hasn’t been near the place.” 

“That’s pretty weird,” the Doctor said with a slightly concerned face. 

“Unusual perhaps, but not weird. No one would be remotely surprised if the roles were reversed and it was a man who wouldn’t bother with a child he fathered.” 

“True.” John tapped one of the plastic fish. “But the really surprising thing is how well you’ve managed.” 

“I know. I had no idea that I would be remotely interested in a child at all. But I just adored him the moment I saw him. The hospital staff hated me because I wouldn’t go home. They kept kicking me out. I hated being separated from him. That was weird.” 

“Maybe you’ve got a heart after all?” John tipped his lovely face to one side, slightly teasing, but with kindness. 

“Let’s not make hasty conclusions,” I smiled back. 

My heart pounded at the sight of John’s doubting face. 

*** 

 

We moved on from my heart to John’s, and he explained the whole Mary Morstan saga to me. 

It transpired she was a originally a Canadian citizen who held dual citizenship with the United States. Her father was a police officer. She had joined the CIA after college – in some clerical capacity, John thought - and turned out to have an aptitude for target practice. She was trained as an agent on the basis of this skill and left after fifteen years to freelance as an assassin. Not surprisingly, killing people for a fee turned out to be hazardous and made her a target amongst some very undesirable people in the United States. She and her family sought refuge here, and she had targeted John as the perfect disguise. 

“She figured that no one looking for her would have suspected her to be a nurse, married to a doctor, living in suburban London,” he explained. 

I thought she was wrong, but we all make our choices with based on our personal interpretation of available data. “And her de facto was okay with it?” 

“As far as I’m aware, it was his idea, initially. Until he got concerned that she was getting too involved with me, and that I was becoming too attached” – John’s voice split a little here – “too attached to Ollie. He asked her to leave me and run away with him again, but she refused. They had a huge fight about it. Then he blew the whistle on her.” 

“Why did she refuse to leave?” 

“She knew I would hunt her down for Ollie, and that would have exposed her, him and the whole family. I think she planned to stick around for a few years and have the marriage break up naturally.” 

That was interesting. “Was that a plausible theory?” 

John smirked at me. “I was planning to leave her when Ollie turned one.” 

Clearly there were many things I didn’t quite grasp about Dr Watson’s marriage. We had a very pleasant spell of staring into one another’s eyes, neither of us quite brave enough to move beyond that.

“So. The husband. What happens to him?” 

The lights in John’s eyes dimmed. “He’s alive. He doesn’t know how lucky he is. I don’t know. I think he turned informant so he could stay with the children.” 

“He’s informing on his wife. And I expect on all the people she took payment from.” 

“I guess. I don’t know.” 

“Witness protection. Dull. What about Mary? Is she being tried here?” 

“They were going to extradite her to the States. At least eleven counts of murder, all over the world. Probably more. If she ever gets out over there, she’ll go straight to prison somewhere else.” 

“Death penalty?” I asked this with a pained face but John was quite detatched. 

“I don’t know for sure. I think her first murders were in California. She has to serve sentences there first, then in Nevada, Texas and Illinois. They definitely have the death penalty in Texas, but I doubt she’ll ever finish her sentence in California. She’s facing two consecutive forty year sentences.” 

The whole scenario was horrible. John’s love of danger and his belief that he can fight wars single handedly has caused him some horrific pain. He needs someone to watch out for him. I could feel my face growing quite foolish with love so I changed the subject quickly. 

“What was her real name?” 

“Adrienne. They never told me her last name.” 

“Seriously? Adrienne?”

“Yes?” Why?” 

And then I told him the story of Albion’s mother. He laughed bitterly. 

Don’t tell me truth isn’t stranger than fiction. 

*** 

I was thrilled to see that John Watson looked very well. His skin was clear and smooth and his eyes quite bright. 

When I killed myself, I returned to find John had grown a very heavy military style moustache. It was not becoming. Absence from me seems to impedes his ability to shave, but he’s managing that a little better because this time he had a closely trimmed beard that I thought was rather dashing. It emphasised his fine, subtle mouth. 

But it was early days for John and I, and decided it would be best to withhold that impression for later. Instead I asked if the trip had eased his heart sickness. 

John shrugged. We were both lying on our sides, heads propped up on our hands. Albion was still sleeping on the rug between us. It seemed John and I re-establishing our close ties bored him. 

“It got me away from it all. From the whole Mary mess.” 

“Is that what you wanted?” 

He shook his head. “I had to go, Sherlock, or else I’d be in prison too. I would have killed him. I wanted to kill him.” 

This was intensely painful for him. He paused for a second and picked some fluff from the rug while he gathered his nerve to tell the truth. “I was going to kill him. When I left you at the hospital that day that’s what I planned to do. I knew where he was. I was intending to kill him just to get Ollie back.” He paused again and bit his lip, then leaned over to touch Albion’s hand, watching the little fingers closed around his thumb. 

“I was murderous. I’ve never felt like it in my life. I hope I never do again. I was so angry at Mary, so angry at him, and so angry at myself.” John took his hand away from Albion and jammed his eyes shut to keep the anger from coming back. 

“You had good reason to be angry at her.” 

“Yeah, but …well, I knew what she was. After she shot you the first time, I knew everything, even without knowing, if that makes sense.” 

It did. 

“But then Ollie was born and it didn’t matter. I kept fooling myself that everything would be fine if I could just hold out for a year. I just couldn’t imagine it would turn out as bad as it did.” 

“No one could have. She tricked everyone. What she did to you was monstrous.”

“Yeah.” John looked at me with sadly. “Remember when you said ‘you chose her?’” 

I did. 

“It made sense, when I thought about it. I do like danger. I like to push myself to my limits. That’s what I want my romantic relationships to be like. It made sense that I ‘d sense those things about her and find them attractive. But then I kept wondering, why did she chose me? I used to think she chose me because, well, you know, she fell in love with a man who was a doctor and a soldier, and I thought she must have seen how much I wanted to settle down and start a family.” 

John tapped the purple fish again and we watched it swinging aimlessly. “After they took Ollie away and told me all about her, I realised she saw a broken down man who was in mourning, some bloke who was just desperate for any kind of comfort. She needed someone broken to dupe. I was exactly the kind of sap she was looking for.” 

Once again, I could see in ugly detail the damage I did to John Watson when I killed myself. I will never forgive myself. 

“No,” I said, “A thousand times no. You are never that person. She might have thought she saw that, but I think we’d both agree her vision is pretty limited. She took advantage of the damage I caused you. That she underestimated the man you are is entirely her shortcoming.” 

“Thank you.” John shrugged. “Doesn’t matter now. It’s all in the past. Ollie would have forgotten me completely. If any one ever tells her about me when she’s an adult, she’ll have to take their word for it because won’t remember me.” 

It was horrendous to see him like this. I wanted to fix it. “Do you want to try and get her back? Mycroft would help.” 

“No. Its pointless. I’ve got no claim on her. She’s back in Canada now, with her” – John Watson stammered a little here – “biological father, her grandparents, she’s even got a brother and sister. She should be with her family. Her real family.” He breathed very deeply and covered Albion with a corner of the rug. “It’s not her fault her parents were liars and did that to us. It’s in her best interest that she has no more disruption. She needs to have stability and a real family.” 

And to think I couldn’t work out why I love John Watson. 

“Of all the things Mary could do to me, that was the cruelest.” John smiled then, and wrinkled his nose a me a little. “That and shooting you.” 

I shrugged. “No damage.” 

“Yeah, there was. I’m sorry about that. Both times.” 

“Don’t think about it again. It’s in the past too.” 

John stretched awkwardly. It was clear his shoulder was starting to hurt. In any case, the light was fading and he, like all good English men, would be wanting supper soon. 

Which caused me great excitement because Anya had left two home cooked casseroles in the fridge a couple of days ago and that meant for the first time ever, I was going to be able to offer John a home cooked meal.


	37. Chapter 37

It’s possible I sound like a cheap date, luring John Watson back into my bed before he’s unpacked his luggage. 

But it’s always been like that for us. Five years ago, he moved in with me after one brief meeting. We had known each other for twenty four hours when he killed a man he believed threatened my safety. We were fast friends almost from the moment we met. 

We clicked perfectly, without delay. 

Our progress has been unusual, partly because neither of us could be certain exactly what we were progressing, and partly because any kind of relationship , until Albion showed up, struck me with blind terror. 

There are a whole lot of other factors that hindered us, dull things we kept doing wrong – John dating a string of colourless women, both of us playing chicken with criminals every week, me declaring my sociopathy as a warning, my fake suicide, John marrying a psychopathic assassin – and these are precisely the reasons that I thought it was high time John Watson and I threw caution to the wind and rushed into one another’s arms. All the bad things that could possibly happen have happened to us, along with some impossible bad things that no one could imagine. We’ve endured it all and still we’re friends. 

And I still love him. 

He hadn’t said he loved me. I was aware that might be an issue but I didn’t care. He’d rescued me from Social Services, held my baby and brought his luggage upstairs. There were (relatively) clean sheets on my bed. 

Angels were standing by, waiting for us to make them weep.


	38. Chapter 38

Our first sexual encounter hadn’t been particularly satisfying . It came at a bad time in both our lives and culminated in his then-wife shooting me. Again. It was hardly the stuff of great romance, and certainly not what I thought John and deserved. 

To be honest, I’m not entirely certain what kind of night I thought I deserved with John Watson, but I do know it involved him actually being there, not wearing a shirt, and telling me I’m amazing. 

My limited expectations were useful. We both turned out to be much greater idiots than we realised when it came to having sex. 

We were plagued by unexpected levels of fear. We didn’t know how to start kissing one another. I was uncertain if it was permissible to start unbuttoning his shirt. We both worried that we would wake the baby so we retired the couch, which was too small, and we ended up rolling onto the floor, which was too hard. 

We were quiet for a few seconds and then his laughter, his silliest, most adorable laughter, diffused the whole tortuous thing. 

“I’ve been dreaming about this for twelve months!” 

That delighted me and I laughed with him. “Me too!” 

“We’re rubbish at this!” 

That made me laugh harder. “Hopeless!” 

It was wonderful to realise we were both the worst kind of virgins for each other. 

“John, I have a fabulous idea.” 

”Of course you do! Let’s hear it.” 

“I propose we start at the beginning. It’s clear we haven’t got much idea how to manage this so we should approach our congress as if we were teenagers and learn as we go.” 

I should point out that I said that in between peals of laughter. We were both panting at the end. 

“Can’t hurt,” the breathless Watson said after we laughed some more. 

“So…do something adolescent to me.” 

And we laughed some more, which made us embrace very warmly, and for a few seconds that was all we needed. It was very nice. 

Hugging people, I think, can be awkward. I never know exactly what to do when someone hugs me. Then there is the minefield of when to end the hug. I find I am always first, and end up holding myself very still still until the other person has finished. 

Hugging John Watson was different. He hugs very well. I didn’t want it to stop. He smells like fresh things you find outdoors, and his scent intensifies around his hairline and, I was certain, under his shirt, when I could raise the necessary nerve to open it. 

So while we laid there laughing at our uselessness, we started making love without any plans at all. John moved his hand under my shirt, I started kissing his throat, and with some careful moves got to the stage where we we pressing our bare chests against teach other. 

“This is good,” he whispered in my ear.

“You’re good,” I whispered back. 

“We’re good,” he concluded. “We’re going to be great once we get our trousers undone.” 

We laughed again. I didn’t know if I should undo his flies, or mine, or what to do, so I left it for the time being and enjoyed the access he allowed me to his chest. 

He’s all kinds of marine colours, John Watson. His eyes are like the sea at Antibes, his skin is the colour of the sand in the archipelagos of Malaysia, and his body hair is like stones you might find on the beaches in South Africa. The softer creases in his armpits and, I learnt a little later, his groin, are two shades darker, like the very fine pale dirt around the trees on Sabu, and as warm.

While I catalogued the Watson colour spectrum, he raised his hand so that my chin fitted perfectly in the cup of his palm. He used his thumb to still my lips and then leaned in to kiss me. 

This was the kiss we had been waiting for. It was very warm, and very soft, and with it came the overwhelming realisation that this was it. This was him, in my arms, with nothing at all to come between us. There was nothing we didn’t know about each other. It felt like we had watched each other across a highway of never ending traffic for five years and now all the traffic had gone and we could reach other effortlessly. 

“Ah, Sherlock,” he said very softly as we started to rock our bodies gently against one another. I slipped off his shirt, he tugged at my trousers, I slipped my hand down his pants to the perfect gluteus muscles and the secret warmth at the crease, he spread his fingers over my balls and I thought the weight of my heart would crack my chest. 

Hs is more beautiful with lust. John is a enthusiastic lover whose responses are very honest and heartfelt. I could feel his love with every touch. His hot mouth rolling over my chest, biting softly at my abdomen and taking me by surprise when he quickly pushed my pants out of the way and pushed his face against my cock, reaching up to hold my hand as he gave me the most intimate of kisses. 

It’s my belief that sex is subversive because you temporarily abandon all your allegiances for a few futile moments of unchallenged pleasure. It was John Watson though who taught me that the real act of rebellion is love making, touching and pleasuring someone only because you love them and to not do that is denying your lover something glorious that you can’t bear them to be denied. 

And when you do, you effectively proclaim yourselves as an sovereign country. You rule your love together. No one can disrupt it. I thought I would roar at the top of my lungs as he encouraged me, sucking me so strongly I had to lift my pelvis to keep up with him and when he freed me quite suddenly I gasped in bitter disappointment only to feel his strong hand take my hips and turn me over so I was caging him, taking sobs of breath as he whispered I want to see you come, and I want you to see me too, then guiding my hand to grasp his cock, easing me down against him so we were rubbing off against one another, our hands linked as we pulled each other to the brink, helplessly watching each other desperate for nothing more than the touch of each other and I bowed before it, pushed over the edge by the intensity of the feeling as much as his magnificent touch and while I was helpless I could see him stumbling over the same line, his mouth open, his tongue soft on his lips, his eyes heavy and adoring. I could see it. I could feel it. It was all there, in those perfect blue eyes. 

It was exhausting, renewing and perfect only because it was him. 

We rested our foreheads together and smiled against each other’s face with our eyes closed. I felt like I had been forgiven every sin and was now free to start my life properly. 

“Sherlock.” 

“Yes?” 

“No more fake suicides.” 

“No. Never. Not without you being informed before hand.” 

“And no more assassins.” 

“Or wives in general.” 

John gave me his special giggle again. 

And then Albion reminded me that I am an idiot who just happens to be blessed with the love of two of the greatest males in the world and roared like a banshee for his late night meal service.


	39. Chapter 39

It should have been strange, to be suddenly co-parenting with a man I had loved secretly for almost five years, but John Watson fitted into our little family very quickly, mostly, I think, because there had been an empty space with his name on it for so long. 

I would be lying to say it was easy, because it wasn’t, but it wasn’t hard either, and many times it was incredibly good fun. 

The things that I thought would be most difficult were actually the most simple, and the things that popular culture would suggest are the easiest actually required some effort. 

 

*** 

On our first morning, I woke to find empty spaces on both sides of the bed and a voluble flatulent sound coming from the living room. I wandered out to find Albion naked on the couch, with our physician leaning over him, blowing raspberries on his belly. 

“He doesn’t need you to make that noise for him,” I told John. “He can do that very adequately himself.” 

Both culprits looked up at me - John with his smile, Albion with slight disappointment for interrupting what was apparently a very entertaining event for him. 

Our doctor was needlessly apologetic. “Sorry, didn’t mean to steal him away but he was starting to grizzle, and needed a change, I hope you don’t mind, but I thought I could get him ready for breakfast” – 

I had to nip this in the bud immediately. 

“It’s clear Albion has given you full permission to parent him. He never lets me make those noises on his stomach. And in case you’re still insecure, I think Albion is the luckiest baby in London to be getting constant care from his doctor. Do you do that for all your patients?” 

John laughed. “No, although I might try, if I ever practice again.” And he blew another raspberry on the pink tummy. Albion squealed with laughter. 

“He really likes that.” 

The doctor was surprised. “Haven’t you ever done it?” 

“No. I told you, he can make very adequate farting noises without any help from me.” 

“Right, Sherlock. Tummy. Raspberry. Now.” 

“You or Albion?” The stupid comment was worth it for John’s slightly embarrassed, delighted face. 

“Albion. Obviously. Come on, get down here and blow a raspberry.” 

I knelt down before the doctor, navigating a place for myself amongst the nappy bag, the creams and a small pile of unwashed baby clothes. 

Blowing a raspberry on a wriggling pink tummy is not as simple as it sounds. It took me three attempts to get it right. 

I knew I had it right when Albion squealed. 

“You know he’s laughing at us,” I told John. 

John unwrapped a recently laundered nappy. “Lestrade wasn’t joking. The nappies do match the wallpaper. Where do you even – oh, never mind. Of course you have nappies that would help your baby camouflage against the wall if necessary.” He buried his head back in that soft pink belly. “And he’s not laughing at us. You’re laughing with us, aren’t you? Here,” he said to me, “Have another go. Blowing raspberries on babies is a wonderful workout.”

I gave Watson an effective I-don’t-believe-you look and had another go at the belly raspberry. It was a very soft surface and I had trouble getting a good grip with my lips. I was starting to suspect that this was just as entertaining for Albion. 

After being exposed as a woeful raspberry blower, breakfast was in order. “I’ll make the tea if you want to do the formula,” John suggested tentatively. 

“Do you want to hold him or will I?” 

We both laughed, this time because we were both so pathetic. John apologized again.

“I just don’t want to seem like I’m barging in and taking over.” 

“And I don’t want to look like the callous, lazy parent who’s rescinded all care of his child because there’s a willing participant to assist in his care.” 

We seemed to be stuck, John Watson and I. 

It was an impasse that Albion managed to solve when he cried very loudly at being lumbered now with two idiots who were unable to feed him with any punctuality. 

 

*** 

Later that morning, John and Albion were reading the postcards he had sent. I had them in a pile on my desk. 

John eyed me suspiciously.” I didn’t send these to you.” 

“No. I am painfully aware of that, and frankly still hurt. But I figured you wanted me to read them, and the recipients were willing to let me keep them, either out of pity or kindness.” 

John said nothing. 

“Was there any reason why I didn’t get a post card?” 

 

“I – actually, yes, there is. It’s a sort of – but you know what? Let’s not talk about this now. And when I say that, I don’t mean that you can launch into a tirade about my failure to send you a card and keep it up until I relent. I’ll explain it later.” 

“But I just want to know-“ 

“I know. You want to know everything, and you will. A little later.” 

“Why not now?” 

Albion started crying because I was an idiot who couldn’t follow simple instructions. 

“Now you’ve upset the baby,” John said, pleased.

*** 

Not surprisingly, Albion was a very important factor in the kind of couple John and I were to become. 

Our second attempt at congress was only a little more successful than the first. We used the shower this time, which was actually quite uncomfortable but very funny because it was so inelegant. Our height difference didn’t assist matters, but John Watson insisted that the best part of having sex with some one you love is that it’s with someone you love, and even if you’re being blinded by shower spray and certain you’re both about to slip over and break your back. 

(I dutifully ignored the love bit. He said it in the heat of the moment and I thought it would be more appropriate to make our declarations when we were relaxed and possibly clothed. I didn’t want to scare him away.) 

The doctor was unfazed by this distinctly unromantic setting and giggled when he should have been swooning. (He is the only man I have ever met who giggles. He can produce a perfectly ordinary masculine laugh when the situation requires it, but when he’s with me, and I’ve caused him amusement, he giggles. It is nothing short of delectable.) 

“Why”, he giggled when we had both bought each other great satisfaction, “are we doing this in the shower?” 

I giggled back. Water was running in torrents from my hair and straight into my eyes. 

“We didn’t want to disturb the baby, or render him a emotional mess by using the bed.” 

“Ah. Right.” John made a half-hearted effort to wring some water from my hair. “You know, I think the world’s water crisis could be solved if we utilised your head a little more effectively.” 

“Is there a water crisis?” 

“Don’t tell me you don’t know that the world’s water resources are diminishing.” 

I’d read something about it but at that moment was distracted by John’s large and complex scar. It was the first time I got to look it closely and at leisure. 

The bullet had literally blasted the flesh of his shoulder apart, and although it was entirely healed, I could see each tiny speck of scar left by the sutures. There were twenty-seven. I memorized the placement of each one. 

“You must have been in agony,” I said quietly.

“It’s actually more interesting on the other side,” and he leaned against me, face down and forehead resting just under my chin so I could see the other side. He was right, the exit wound was smaller and neater, but it was obviously that quite a lot of flesh had been disrupted as the bullet tore through him. 

I wished I could heal the whole scar with my hand. John, meanwhile, was making observations of his own.

“You know Sherlock, I think you have the longest feet of any person I have ever known. And I’ve seen a lot of feet.” 

“Yes, they’re pretty spectacular, aren’t they?” 

He took my face in both damp hands. He was on the edge of expanding his view of spectacular but he didn’t have too, because I could see it in his eyes. I love his smile when I he knows I’ve second-guessed his thoughts. 

We shared a meaningful look until it became a little weird and then he slapped me gently on the left buttock to change the subject. “I’ve got to go and see Harry tomorrow.” 

(Harry is John Watson’s sister. She is something of a mystery to me because John never talks about her. I know only what I’ve deduced from a phone she gave John four years ago, because he won’t introduce her to me. This causes me no concern. I would have shielded John from Mycroft were such a thing humanly possible.) 

“Will you be coming back?” 

We were making the treacherous slippery exit from the shower and reaching for towels. 

“Of course. All my clothes are here.” 

I took a deep breath. “Will you stay?” 

“I was hoping to. Are you – do you want me to find somewhere to – I could go to – “ 

“STOP. No. Go nowhere. Stay here.” This was more begging than I ever displayed to John Watson. “Albion would be devastated if you left.” 

“Oh, Albion would. Only Albion?” 

“Mrs Hudson would be heartbroken too.” 

“And Mrs Hudson. Well, I’d hate to disappoint her.” 

We stood there naked, smiling at one another. I was about to say something nice, a more restrained version of ‘I can’t bear the thought of you being anywhere without me for the whole of time’ but Albion started wailing for his late night meal. 

“Now you’ve upset the baby again,” John said with a smirk, and quickly grabbed his robe.

It was a nice feed, that night. John held Albion and applied the bottle while leaning back against me in our bed. I had them both in my arms and felt rather smug. I wondered if all fathers felt like this when they have their family gathered around them. 

“It’s just wonderful to hold a baby again,” John said out of the blue. 

I was smelling his hair, and cataloguing the feeling of the roots against my lips and nose. (Finer than a dog, more coarse than a Himalayan goat.)

“Does it help?” I wondered, and he knew exactly what I meant. 

“Yes. It really does. I actually thought that I could never - you know, I didn’t want any more children after I had to let her go, but this is fantastic.” 

“Well, he’s a fantastic child. You’d be amazed at all the things he can do.” 

“Can he hit a target yet with a semi automatic at close range yet?” 

“Not yet. I told him that if he was lucky, you might teach him one day.” 

“Definitely.” He lifted the drowsy baby onto his shoulder to pat the wind out of him. “I’m going to paint the upstairs room too, if that’s okay with you.” 

“Why?” 

“He needs his own room. Actually he doesn’t, but we do. One of us is going to end up in a wheelchair if we keep screwing on the floor.” 

“Anya’s been on my back to give him his own room. I can’t fight both of you.” 

“She’s pretty formidable. I wouldn’t fight her either. She’s had military training, hasn’t she?” 

“Probably. She’s East German, and was in the secret police.”

“Oh, then she definitely has. Military training was compulsory for the East Germans.” John leaned forward so I could see Albion’s face. “Is he asleep?” 

Albion was lolling on John’s shoulder, trying to stay awake so he could learn about the new nursery. 

“Just about.” 

While we waited for him to drop off, I asked about the post cards again. 

“Tomorrow,” John Watson said again. “We’ll talk about post cards tomorrow.“


	40. Chapter 40

“I think you’ve slept more in the last 48 hours than you did in the entire time I lived here before.” 

John Watson and Albion were making breakfast in the kitchen. I’d evidently missed this morning’s raspberry session. 

John carefully adjusted my clean baby in my arms. “Here. Hold this while I get his bottle and make us tea.” 

“Good morning!” I said to Albion, who smiled and made some vowels for me. We were delighted to see each other. “Have you been assisting Doctor Watson with raspberries?” 

“He has,” John confirmed. “He’s also been helping me change nappies.” 

“Yes, nappies are one of his great skills, at the moment. I hope not forever.” 

“After about six months it seems like forever.” John was spooning tea leaves in the pot. “Does Anya come on Mondays?” 

“You want to ask her about the army, I expect.” 

“I might,” although it was as plain as the noses on our faces that John Watson was desperate to talk military things with Anya. “Does she come today?” 

“She works five days a week, starts at eight and leaves at four. Now. Postcards.” 

“I haven’t forgotten.” 

“Nor have I forgotten how obstinate you can be. Are you going to explain why I never got a post card?” 

John handed me a warm bottle and Albion cooed. My boy was becoming very good at deducing small things. “Of course. But we’re going to have breakfast first, and I’m going to read the paper.” 

“You’ve come back more captain-like than you were before.” 

John sipped his tea with a small, sly smile. He was not going to badgered by me this morning. I changed tack. 

“So when will you visit Harry?” 

“I’m going to leave here in about an hour. She’s out near Catford now, so I probably won’t get home until this afternoon. Am I safe to leave you here alone?” 

“Perfectly. I have cold files to work on. In any case, Anya brings Albion in to check on me frequently, so I never get the chance to get into any serious trouble.” 

“Who’s coming up the stairs?” John wondered as someone with a heavy step made their way to the door. 

I drained my first cup. “The British Government. He drops in every morning on his way to work to remind Albion that no one life can be perfect.” 

“Ah, Doctor Watson,” my brother sang as he waltzed through the door. “How lovely it is to see that we have at least one grown up at 221b.” 

“Hello Mycroft.” 

John Watson is possibly the one person in the world who isn’t at all frightened of Mycroft, and I think this explains why Mycroft likes John. 

“Hello my darling,” Mycroft said sweetly as he leaned over me while Albion slurped. 

“Hello sugarchops.” I said this solely for John Watson’s benefit, who choked a little on his tea as he guffawed. 

“Don’t be painful, Sherlock,” Mycroft scowled. “Would you like me to finish feeding Albion while you have your breakfast?” 

This arrangement worked very nicely except for a brief squalling moment when Albion though I was taking his half-finished bottle from him forever. 

“Oh, there, there,” his uncle soothed. “No one’s going to starve you.” 

John Watson watched the Holmes men with some interest. “Never took you for a person much interest in babies,” he said to Mycroft. 

“Funnily enough John, I didn’t either. Now I can’t imagine life without him.” 

I rolled my eyes. Mycroft is unusually nauseating when he is being kind. 

*** 

John Watson was still showering when Anya came to start work. 

“Hello Mr Albion,” she said crisply. “It is a beginning to be a very beautiful day outside so I think we should both enjoy a walk to the park.” 

I had wrapped Albion up in one of his most choice cardigans and pulled the hood over his head. Little dark tufts stuck out at the front. “Look out for wild boars, and tell me about everything you see when you come home.” 

Albion gurgled with a wobbly head when I kissed his little cheek. John Watson appeared at that moment, showered, dressed in a jumper not unlike Albion’s and clean-shaven. 

“You have taken off your beard,” Anya observed correctly. 

“Yeah, I don’t usually wear one. I’ve been travelling and it was just easy not to shave every day.” 

This struck Anya as highly suspicious and she didn’t answer. She and John shared some low grade semi-hostile staring out. 

I had no idea what they were doing. It was disconcerting and I had to put a stop to it. “Are we going to have a cold war here in the lounge room?” 

The both turned their stern glances to me. 

I looked from one to the other. “What?” 

It ended almost as soon as it started. “I will now take Mr Albion to the park. I will see you both later, Mr Sherlock and Mr John.” 

“Captain,” John said softly, as he bent over to kiss Albion goodbye. 

She turned and smiled stiffly. “Captain John.”

“What was that all about?” I asked the now smooth doctor when she had gone. 

He was unconcerned. “Just an army thing. You always do it when you meet a soldier from another country, particularly if there’s been hostility between the countries in the past. We were just letting each other know that we couldn’t be bullied.” 

“Oh for Christ’s sake.” I would have complained more but John was now clean-shaven and it was distracting. I stared a little too long. 

“Approve?” 

“Yes. I actually liked you with a beard – infinitely more than I did when you wore a moustache – but now you look like the vulnerable doctor who loaned me his phone at St Barts all those years ago. Now. What about my post cards?” 

John slapped me lightly on the left buttock, which was beginning to become a little habit. “Go have a shower and we’ll talk.” 

“We could talk now.” 

“Yes, but we won’t. Have a shower, and as soon as you come out, you’ll know everything.” 

 

*** 

This was a ruse, for when I emerged twenty minutes later, clean and dressed and ready to hear John Watson’s litany of pitiful excuses, he was no where to be found. 

I had just started cursing when I saw a large manila envelope on which John had written my name and underlined it twice. 

The envelope was filled with 108 postcards from cities in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Morocco, Zambia, Tanzania, Victoria Falls, South Africa, Reunion, Madagascar, Beijing, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, The Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, the Antarctic, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Canada and the United States. 

Every single postcard had my name and address on the right hand side. 

And on the left hand side, where one would write their greeting, each one had exactly the same text: 

I love you too. 

(All except for one from Buenos Aires, which included a small note that read, “You’d be surprised how much penguins remind me of you.”) 

These cards were, of course, a response to my miserable claims before he left all those months ago. 

I read each one so many times I lost count, and I never lose count of anything. No one has ever told me they loved me 108 times, in writing. (Or compared me to a penguin. The two things are now are indelibly linked for me.) 

I sent John a quick text, to save me having to talk to him face-to-face about this. 

I got your postcards. SH

And then followed it very quickly with my real feelings, which I thought warranted capital letters.

YOU ARE WHOLLY MAGNIFICENT. SH

A few minutes later I got this reply: 

Only for you. JW


	41. Chapter 41

A couple of weeks later, John Watson and Detective Inspector Lestrade were wobbling up the stairs, carrying cans of paint. 

John and Lestrade had taken an excursion to a hardware store together. I had been invited but turned down this opportunity so I could stay and admire Albion, who could now hold his head up by himself. 

“Great idea putting the baby upstairs,” Lestrade said to me with his casual grin. “Be perfect when he’s a teenager.” 

I couldn’t see why. “How so?” 

“Well. Teenagers love storming off in sulks and slamming doors. They like it even better when they can stamp up stairs and then slam the door. It annoys their parents more and makes more noise.” 

I’m rather partial to a good sulk myself. I anticipate that if Albion is prone to stamping, door-slamming sulks, they will be exactly like mine. 

However, such projection was of no more concern to me. I was more interested in the paint. 

“You can have whatever’s left over,” John Watson promised. “When I’ve finished. Until I’ve finished, the paint is off limits.” 

Albion and I both peered at the tins. He wasn’t so interested, but only because he doesn’t know how to separate paint with simple acids, nor how to add droplets of paint to fatty tissue and time the rate of absorption. 

I wonder sometimes if being a baby isn’t boring for him. 

John Watson cupped the silky little neck and drew Albion close so he could kiss his fuzzy head. Albion was losing his crest, and the very fine down that was coming up underneath was apparently wavy. 

“My God, he looks like you,” Lestrade said, as if it were some kind of a miracle. “Did I tell you his mother is in New York?” 

“You did not.” This new intelligence caused some inward relief. I wasn’t interested to hear anything else, but John Watson, I believe, was a tad obsessed. 

“Is she? You’ve found her?” 

“We’ve tracked her passport. We don’t know exactly what she’s doing there.”

“I can tell you what she’s doing there. The same thing she does here. Smoking opiates. “

Lestrade shook his head. “We don’t think she is. I’ve looked at her hospital records. She was entirely clean when she had Albion, which rules out her using at least a fortnight before he was born.” 

“But was she using before that?” the doctor asked. 

“Well, according to his chart, Albion is entirely healthy, and we can’t find any evidence that she was using while she pregnant. She was certainly fraternising with three known junkies, but each of them swore blind that she wasn’t using while she was pregnant.” 

I wasn’t convinced, but I wasn’t much interested either. I was reading the paint cans. John Watson had chosen two colours – sky and cloud. 

“Are you going to paint stripes?” 

He made a crinkled-nosed face at me. “Polka dots. Never you mind what I’m going to paint. Just don’t touch a drop until I’ve finished.” 

“It must be a nightmare bringing anything home here,” Lestrade said. 

“Only interesting things,” I clarified. “Albion and I are going to have a cup of tea. Will you join us, Inspector?” (I didn’t ask John because the question is redundant. John Watson always wants a cup of tea. It is one of his factory settings.) 

“You’re not feeding the kid tea?” 

“No!” John said hastily. “He just doesn’t stop crying when we put him down, so he ends up doing everything with us.” 

“It’s not actual crying,” I explained. “It’s just mindless yelling.”

“Well, he’s a baby. That’s his job. Don’t worry. He’ll stop in about five years’ time.”

John looked relieved. Albion, who was starting to display the precision timing demonstrated by circus acrobats, started crying, possibly because I wasn’t allowed to mess with the paint. 

***

I was denied access to the room while it was being painted, partly because John wanted it to be a surprise, but mostly so I wouldn’t interfere with the paint. I was actually more interested in interfering with John Watson, who kept appearing at odd times in very old jeans and a t-shirt that seemed to be held together by mere molecules of cotton, all daubed with swipes of sky-coloured paint that matched the shade of his eyes exactly. 

Sadly, our opportunities to interfere with each other were limited, because most of our time was consumed with Albion yelling. He wasn’t yelling about anything specific. It was exhausting for all of us. I was starting to recycle my stories for him, and had run out of ways to make the periodic chart sound more interesting. 

John was more physical with his approach – he'd lay Albion over his shoulder, pat his little bottom and pace the floor, all the while repeating soft, kind things in a gentle way. It actually put me to sleep on a couple of occasions. 

Roaring babies are stressful. No one knows why they are roaring and according to John Watson, parents give up wondering why their baby is crying after about four nights. The focus shifts to getting the baby to stop crying. According to my observations of Albion, a baby will stop crying when they feel like it. 

I am wholly aware that a small angry person yelling for hours about nothing in particular is stressful for anyone, and it may have been for me if I were someone who needed eight hours sleep. I am in the happy position that I can survive very heartily on two, and have been known to go for up to three days without any at all. 

This meant I could do night crying duty so John Watson, who is useless without at least six hours kip, and better if he has seven, could get proper rest every night. 

Getting a good night’s sleep meant John was available to spend the early morning walking the floor and patting a little bottom. 

(“You’ve upset the baby” become a running joke for us, and was privately celebrated by me because we had never had a running joke before. This one was especially good because we got to use it in a dozen different contexts every day, because it seemed Albion was upset by just about anything.)

As soon as Anya would arrive, Albion, satisfied that he had successfully completed a good session of mournful wailing and shortened both John’s and my life expectancy, would promptly go to sleep. No doubt he was restoring his strength so he could wail loudly at John and me when her shift finished. 

 

*** 

After ten days of silently slapping paint on the wall upstairs and driving me out of mind in his painting clothes, John Watson called me upstairs to see the new nursery. 

I only went so I could leer at John in his disintegrating t-shirt. 

The room was breathtaking. 

John had painted the walls blue, the skirting boards white, and had used a stencil to make clouds on each wall. It was very cheerful. 

But that wasn’t the best part. 

He turned off the light and closed the curtains so I could see the phosphorescent stars he had adhered to the ceiling. Thus Doctor Watson had made Albion’s nursery a visual lesson in night and day. 

I was dumbstruck. John Watson is the only person who can do that to me. 

I was overcome with gratitude that this man was here to teach Albion the important things that I don’t even remember or have deleted. More importantly, I realised that all the things he had no doubt planned to do for Ollie, and was forced to discard, he had resurrected and was now willing to hand over to Albion. 

He was parenting my little boy. It made my insides feel soft and unsound. It was sentiment and it was beautiful. 

“Do you like it?” 

I couldn’t stop staring at the starry ceiling. “It’s brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.” 

John, resplendent in his tattered clothes, could hear the emotion in my voice, which was a bit disconcerting for both of us. 

Both the good doctor and I expected Albion’s crying to reach peak capacity when he was introduced to his nursery, but surprisingly he slept for six hours straight on his first night in his own room. 

“Maybe he was crying because he hated sharing a room with us,” John suggested. 

Personally, I thought Albion slept more soundly because the stars made him feel safe. 

My boy was making progress in other areas. He would now reach for something if I held it out for him (or put it within his reach) and he smiled at John as readily as he smiled at me. John had become as familiar to him as I was. 

He also sat through his first violin recital, when I played Mozart’s variations of Ah Vous, Dirais-je, Maman for him while he lay in his cot. John Watson correctly identified this as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. 

Albion listened with a mixture of bewilderment and satisfaction. When I finished he sucked his fist, blinked twice and made that flat little wail he uses to let me know he’s going to start crying in earnest if one of us didn’t pick him up quickly. 

John Watson picked him up quickly. 

“Wasn’t that wonderful?” John said to him. 

Albion was not giving away any secrets. 

“I can’t tell if he likes it or hates it,” I complained to John, who was laying Albion over his shoulder and preparing for some heavy duty patting and pacing. 

“I don’t think he’s too sure himself. But don’t let that worry you. If it’s any consolation, I loved it. Albion will too one day.” 

I’m wasn’t convinced, but was very smug that John enjoyed it.


	42. Chapter 42

Getting Albion to stop crying for thirty minutes at a stretch was one of the less complicated aspects of our life. 

Neither John nor I are partial to emotional, heartfelt conversations, no matter how necessary they might be. Because of this, we both wondered privately exactly what was going to become of us. When we first met five years ago, we worked on cases together, and in between cases, John doctored at a local clinic. 

Our life together now was much different: promising but wholly unformed. We had Albion, the cold cases, and we talked a lot about things that weren’t emotional. But our days were a little aimless, and it bothered us both. 

Two people changed that for us in the space of eighteen hours. 

 

***

The first was Detective Inspector Lestrade, who came to se John and I when we had a full house. 

It was 8.15 in the morning. John and Anya were staring each other down as Albion was being prepared for a walk to the park. 

(They had not progressed beyond this. It was clear that they both wanted to discuss details of their respective military careers but refused to do so until one silently acknowledge the other was in charge. 

“Can’t you both be the same rank?” I’d asked Captain Watson privately a few nights earlier. 

“Definitely not. I outrank her, and she knows it. As soon as she acknowledges my seniority, we can talk. Until then, I’ll continue to stare her down.”

Knowing the intractable Watson like I do, and based on my recent deductions of Nanny Anya, I’m assuming they’ll still be staring each other out when Albion graduates from university.)

Mycroft was there too, having completed his morning visit by pestering me to take Albion to visit his grandparents. 

Mrs Hudson let Detective Lestrade in. 

It was clear that Mrs Hudson and Anya had been sharing a number of secrets because they both smirked when they met in our lounge room. Mycroft was setting Albion in his pram, John was being ridiculous with his staring and Lestrade looked like he had been locked in a monkey’s cage. 

I was the only sensible person in the room and took it upon myself to restore order. 

“Detective Inspector. Lovely to see you. Mrs Hudson, thank you again for assisting guests’ passage to my rooms. Mycroft, your country needs you. Anya, have a lovely walk. Albion, I adore you. Behave yourself on your walk, don’t swear at policemen and be prepared to tell me everything you see in the park when you return. John, you won this morning’s eyeballing contest. Now. Lestrade. Tell me why you’re here.” 

Everyone rolled their eyes at me (except Albion, who just gurgled when I kissed his fat little cheek) and set about their respective tasks. 

Lestrade said, “I’m not sure if this is too soon or if you two are even taking cases, but I’ve got a strange one and haven’t got a clue where to start.” 

Both John and I sparked as out metaphorical ignitions were started. 

“Tell me more,” we both said at the same time. 

It was an interesting case that seemed simple enough. There was one victim with a slashed throat. There were three suspects, but only one had made the fatal incision. Each had been with the victim a the time of death, each denied it and blamed one of the others. Lestrade and his team had been trying to decide who was responsible. 

Legally, all three could be responsible, if there was enough evidence to prove it was an enterprise – that is, that all three had set out with the intention of killing the victim. Enterprise is a very difficult thing to prove. What was needed in order to prepare a brief of evidence was proof that one person was responsible for the murder, and on that basis appropriate charges could be laid against the others. 

At this stage there was no substantial proof to permit accusation of any of the suspects.

“Do you want a lift?” Lestrade asked. 

I shook my head as I grabbed my coat. “John and I will take a cab.” 

The victim had been murdered in his dingy flat in Archway. The suspects and victim had been playing cards, there’d been an altercation and one of the suspects had slashed the victim’s throat. There were copious amounts of blood and some disarray of the furniture. 

Doctor Watson and I exchanged very brief meaningful glances. It was good to be back at a crime scene. 

We had not been on a case together for more than two years but we knew exactly what to do as soon as we got there. The victim had been removed, but the blood spatter was in place and Lestrade gave us full access to the crime scene photographs. I measured each spatter pattern. John paced the length and width of the room. We calculated roughly where each suspect stood, and compared our calculations with the pictures of their blood stained clothes. 

“Arterial blood spurts at a very sharp angle,” John reminded me. “The person closest to the victim at the time of impact would have been drenched, and on the upper body, if they were both standing. If the victim was sitting, that table would be covered with blood, but there’s only a few drops.” 

I have said before that John is a conductor of light and once more he was operating on full voltage. The drops on the table were just that – drops, not spray – which indicated that the victim had apparently staggered by the table before he collapsed. 

Two of the suspects’ statements claimed the victim had been sitting down when he was attacked. John and I were able to prove that, based on the spatter patterns, all four men would have had to have been standing. This meant the fight was not sudden and therefore the topic of the fight was not a minor point; the accused would have had an emotional investment in the argument. 

Thus the fatal wound was not a badly executed angry reaction, but the result of a festering grudge. 

The height of each suspect would help clarify who was mostly to have inflicted the wound. But in order to assess that , I’d need to measure the wound and compare it to similar wounds. 

The Doctor and I were fizzing with enthusiasm. “We need to see knife patterns,” John declared and he was right. We rushed down to St Barts to use Molly’s extensive and very precise database. 

Molly was thrilled to show off her excellent wound catalogue. I was thrilled to learn she had such a catalogue. 

“Do you only have neck wounds?”

Molly gave me a knowing smile. “I have a catalogue for every arterial region.” 

I planned to have memorized that entire catalogue by the time Albion turned one. 

“Sherlock!” John called from the computer. “Look at these left-to-right wounds!” 

We pored over dozens of images of slash wounds, all of which Molly had catalogued with precise details, including the circumstances of each cut. 

We also got to the see the victim himself, but since the autopsy had been performed, he had been cleaned and most of the most important clues washed away. 

John Watson examined his hands. 

“Anything?” I asked. 

“No defensive wounds.” 

That was very important. Victims of knife trauma almost always have defensive wounds unless they are attacked from behind – or someone holds their hands while they are attacked. 

We were calculating the length of the wound alongside the height of each suspect when Mike Stamford ambled in. 

“Hullo Sherlock. Oh, hullo John! Thanks for the postcard! Glad you came home – everyone should have a long holiday. You must be keen to get back to work. I need someone to supervise fourth years in trauma. Do you want to apply for a job here? 

*** 

By the end of the week, Lestrade had laid charges against two of the three suspects, but only one with charged with murder. (The man who had restrained the victim during the attack got aggravated assault and detain with advantage. I spoke briefly with the third man, who still was in shock from witnessing the murder. It was obvious he had no part.) 

And by the end of the month, John Watson had been interviewed for the role of Clinical Lecturer (Level 3, Part Time, position Number Kx77493022). 

Best of all, Albion had started to smile when he saw me standing at his cot, holding my violin.


	43. Chapter 43

Anya had joined us for a cup of tea in our kitchen on a Friday afternoon. John Watson was explaining to her (for the sixth time) that her rank in the East German army thirty years ago was on par with a British Lance Corporal. 

She was impervious to his steely gaze. 

“You may have been a captain but I would have been your superior due to my age and my extensive qualifications. I am an expert in aeronautical engineering.” 

The staring contests had stopped. The militia at 221 Baker Street had now started arguing – circular, pointless arguments with no chance of a truce. 

John Watson was in full Captain mode.

“Your qualifications are irrelevant. If I had given you an order, you would have been obliged to follow it. And I’m a medical doctor. I would have been on par with you, professionally.” 

While the war raged in the kitchen, Albion and I were on the floor, sorting plastic fish. I liked to arrange them in the colours of the rainbow (starting with violet), Albion liked to arrange them by sucking them. I believe he designated his arrangements by the texture of the fish on his gums. As a result, each fish was glazed with baby spit, which I find interesting. His saliva is very pure, clear and thin as fresh sap. It made his little mouth look even more red. 

“John, how much drool can a nineteen week old infant produce in a thirty second period?” 

“It’s deceptive,” he called from the kitchen where he was making tea. “It seems like litres but in reality it’s only about a teaspoons’ worth.” 

“Mr Albion might enjoy to have a dummy to use up all his saliva,” Anya suggested. 

I was under the impression that a dummy was a bad thing, but monitoring Albion’s saliva production with and without a dummy was a tantalizing thought. 

“I thought dummies were out of vogue.” 

“Dummies are lifesavers,” baby confident Watson said. “And babies love them.” 

“All of my babies had dummies and they have developed to be normal humans,” Anya added. 

“I don’t understand why you two can agree on something as controversial as dummies yet can’t bond over your military experiences. Would you like the orange fish or the blue fish?” 

(Obviously the last part of that statement was directed at Albion, who was happy to drool on either.)

“I want the yellow one,” John said as he put my tea on the coffee table near by.   
“And we’ll bond over our military experiences when Anya agrees that I’m her superior.” 

“We can never be bonding for as long as I have to take orders from the British Army,” Anya said as she sipped her tea, which she likes very strong and black.   
“Mr Albion is making fine progressions with his motor skills. Soon he will be able to grab a thing when he reaches for it.” 

“If we aren’t all submerged in litres of his saliva first, yes, he will.” 

*** 

The following week, Mike Stamford called to offer John the job. He had, Mike insisted, been the most experienced candidate and his alma mater was keen to have John instructing a new generation of doctors. 

It was a very exciting night for us. Anya had agreed to watch Albion while I took John to dinner. 

Anywhere you like, I told the academic doctor. My treat. 

He thought about it for a long time. “You know what I really feel like?” 

I thought it was polite to have a guess. “Roast spatchcock, asparagus and boiled new potatoes pureed to a cream with olive oil?” 

“Strangely enough, no.”

“Har Mee with chilli sambal?” 

John Watson made a soft little scowl in response to the suggestion of a big bowl of spicy noodles. 

“No.” 

“Rare venison with a side order of cauliflower au gratin? 

“Have you ever known me to order venison?” 

“That doesn’t preclude you feeling like it now.” 

“We could be here all night. Why don’t I just tell you?” 

“It’s more fun to guess.” 

“No Sherlock, it’s not. What is fun for you is getting it right –because you no doubt have deduced what I want - after you have harassed me with an endless array of international dishes that I would never eat in a thousand years. ” 

I made my indignant face but it was ruined when John Watson softly held my face still in his hands. He does that these days when he wants me to listen closely to his orders. It is very effective. John comes in loud and clear when he holds my face. 

“I want a big bag of hot chips and to sit with you somewhere quiet for a few hours.” 

“Then that, my accomplished, employed Watson, is precisely what you will have.” 

I took John to an excellent chip shop I know of down near University College and ordered the largest serving of hot chips the owner was prepared to make. 

We then took a taxi down near St Paul’s, and sat on a bench near the Thames to eat them. 

It was clear and very cold. We were both wrapped up in coats and scarves. 

“It’s turning out rather well, isn’t it?” 

“Well, Ted does make the best chips. He uses olive oil to fry them, which accounts the extraordinary flavour. His father was Greek, of course, and a great cook. I think the quality of the chips is also enhanced by the fact they’re hand cut and not mass produced” – 

“Not the chips, Sherlock, I meant us. Living together. With Albion. I think it’s turning out well.” 

“Oh.” I couldn’t have been expected to deduce that from John’s ambiguous comment, especially while we were eating the best chips in London. 

“Don’t you think it’s turning out well?” John wondered.

Formulating the best response was difficult. What I wanted to say is that I would be happy living with John Watson and Albion in a cardboard box in a glue factory in a cold despotic country without heating, but those kinds of desperate declarations are embarrassing. 

“How did you think it would turn out?” I asked instead. 

John thought for moment. He was licking salt from his thumb and it was unexpectedly attractive. 

“I had no idea. I didn’t think I’d fit in with you both. I thought you’d prefer to have Albion to yourself.” 

“Well, if you never came back, I would have. But – well, you like babies. You…”

It wasn’t what I meant to say at all. 

“What?” 

I filled my mouth with chips so I didn’t have to answer.

John laughed. “I’m not trying to embarrass you. I just want to be sure that you’re okay with me staying, and that you’re happy.” 

I swallowed a half-masticated wad of potato fibre quickly. “I am very happy. There isn’t room for anyone in my life except you, and you can be certain that no idiot on this earth would be permitted anywhere near my son except you. But that came out wrong because obviously you’re not an idiot. You’re my best - my best” – 

It was so inadequate. John Watson, who was an eminently capable doctor and changed nappies and made tea and manufactured a war of wills with a mild mannered nanny was so much more. 

“Best friend?” John wondered. 

I shook my head. It was hard. 

“You’re the love of my life. If you want to know how I feel about you coming home and living with us, that is my only answer.” 

I looked out at the black water that never stills, never stops travelling, always circulating around London in a perpetual rush. 

“Then I can assume we are in a permanent situation then.” 

“Yes. In fact, you are forbidden to consider any other scenario.” 

“Good! But I need to know - are you enjoying it?” 

I looked over at him, to try and deduce why he was asking this. 

“I only ask because you’ve never been in a live-in type relationship and I’ve been worried that it might be a bit strange for you.” 

“Not strange, no. I might worry that it mightn’t be enough for you and you’ll run off with someone who doesn’t try to index your socks, but that’s my problem, not yours.” 

“I’m not going anywhere,” John assured me as he sorted through the chips for the crunchy bits. “And leave my socks alone.”

*** 

We had been friends for such a long time that it would have been difficult for us not to be a functional couple. I think it is fair to say that in one way or another we had always been in love but circumstances had kept us apart, and that had been for the best. I say that obviously with the luxury of hindsight. 

Our relationship was still very new, and was juggled alongside a baby who liked to cry about nothing special whenever the fancy struck him, and for how ever long he felt like. 

John and I had some sex, but perhaps not as much I think we should have been having. It was nice, gentle sex, not the kind of athletic sex I’ve seen on the internet or in movies I’ve deleted. John hadn’t complained about the sex, and I didn’t want to look like an idiot who embarrassed him by asking if we had normal sex. 

And then it occurred to me that that’s what he had been asking. So I swallowed very hard and asked the embarrassing sex question. 

“Are we having normal sex?” 

John was openly confused. “Is there abnormal sex?” 

“Don’t torture me,” I said through barely open teeth. “Do you like the sex? Am I doing properly?” 

“Of course! Why? Don’t you like it?” 

“I think it’s phenomenal. But I’m probably not the best person to ask, given my only other real alleged sexual encounters were so pitiful my brain didn’t even bother to retain the fact that I had sex, let alone what it was like.” 

John laughed. “I think it’s it wonderful too. And I think it will get better and better.” 

*** 

That bothered me enormously. What should get better? Did he want me to wear a nurse’s uniform? Should I make more noise?

These things would plague me for weeks. 

When we got home, I sent John down stairs to collect Albion, who no doubt had slept through our absence, making sure he was in optimum condition to cry loud and aimlessly until sunrise.

I set about filling the kettle and making tea while wondering if John would like me to yell while we sexed. I’d seen that once on the internet – a man whose criminal activities I had been investigating posted videos of himself and his expensively reconstructed partner having sex. They both yelled, like one might if they were trying to carry on a conversation with the other in a room on the other side of the house. It was interesting and preposterous. 

After ten minutes John had still not returned. 

I filled the pot and set our mugs side by side on the kitchen counter. 

After fifteen minutes I thought something unwholesome had happened and went downstairs to retrieve my son and my doctor. 

I found the love of my life and Anya seated at her small kitchen table, arm wrestling. Mrs Hudson, who looked up and smiled when I entered, was on the couch nearby, sewing a tapestry. Next to her was another unfinished tapestry. Thick streams of coloured thread hung from it, and a small thin needle was tucked through the embroidery. Mrs Hudson and Anya sew tapestries together. Those little things that you never guess or bother to learn about people are so important. Quite unexpectedly my heart filled with love for them both. 

Nearby, Albion was tucked up soundly in his visiting basket, perfectly peaceful with his exquisite little fists folded on either side of his face and his mouth delicately closed as he slept and gathered his strength to keep John and I awake all night. The love in my heart flooded over the top. 

John looked up when I walked in and Anya, obviously a brilliant military tactician, took her chance and flopped his arm flat against the table. 

“Aghh!” John grimaced but only for a second, and then broke out laughing, his most genuine, delighted laugh. “You win!” he said to her, really pleased, and the love slopped out and rushed right through me. 

(Normal people probably are filled with love all the time but until recently I have had no capacity, and no interest, in filling with love. Albion changed all that, when he carved out chambers in my heart that I never knew I had, and made it possible for me to utilise properly the love I have for John Watson. I think it’s possible that I will keep filling up with love. I’m not used to it. It feels very nice and quite frightening at the same time.)

***

Neither John nor I wore any costumes or yelled when we made love that night. I sat up and he straddled my lap so we could kiss in the dark, which is one of my favorite things because I have to deduce his reaction by how he feels in my arms. Better still, I have no idea what he might do next. 

He was very energetic this night, active and a little bossy. It was intensely arousing. The arm wrestle had been beneficial. 

“I know you let her win,” I whispered in his ear and I could feel his body straighten and strengthen as the muscles in his back grew taut. “Damn straight I did,” he whispered back.


	44. Chapter 44

Our lives settled down substantially once John started his new job. I took more and more cases from Detective Lestrade and John, when was able, he came with me. 

It felt like we were living the mirror image of the life we had before I died. Everything was the same except reversed and there was a beautiful baby boy sitting between us, grizzling. 

The same, but different: both John and I were different men from the two who shared the flat four years ago. Better men, I believe. John and I had amassed some interesting and frequently painful life experiences. 

Until now I was certain these happy days were a reward for those periods of misery, but as Mycroft would say, the universe is rarely so lazy. 

He’s right. The universe had a couple more painful lessons for us yet. 

*** 

Albion had been crying consistently all night for about three months. There was no cure, nothing other than cosmetic remedies that lasted an hour or so. We tried them all anyway because you never know: lavender oil, warm baths, a strict routine, a lax routine, no routine, loose bed clothes, swaddling, gentle patting, being rocked to sleep in our bed, being rocked to sleep in his crib – all to no avail. Come night time, Albion was disappointed in everything. 

The one thing that bought occasional relief was fairytales. If we were lucky, he would stop long enough to hear if he heard them before, or if they featured any boars. 

*** 

“You’re going to love this one.” 

I was on the couch, rocking Albion at four thirty in the morning. He continued crying because he liked the way his voice sounded when his body was swayed gently. 

John Watson was tucked up in bed. The dedicated doctor had worked an eleven hour shift that day, I explained to Albion, and needed to sleep. 

“I’m going to whisper it to you so we don’t wake our John. He’s very tired but, unlike you, he understands that if he lays on a soft, gently supported surface and closes his eyes, he’ll fall asleep. You, of course, prefer to cry continuously until you’re exhausted. And that’s fine. You can cry as much as you need to. 

“Meanwhile, I’m going to tell you a fascinating story about some cats. They lived in a large group in an old house, sharing all their food and assets. This is called a collective, which is different to that trio of pigs I’ve told you about, who only lived in the same house so they could share the rent. 

“These cats were looking for a house keeper, because obviously cats don’t do house work. They advertised on-line and in the local paper, and ended up interviewing a fair young maiden called Lupina, who didn’t get on with her mother or her sister because they were idiots. 

“The cats loved Lupina because cats secretly love women who do their housework. Also, she very qualified to do the cats’ housework because she had spent her life being down trodden and doing all the housework for her idiot family. She was also a good cook, which was handy because these cats never stopped eating. They particularly liked casseroles, which is just make believe, because cats are in fact carnivores, like boars. Their guts have evolved to digest uncooked meat. You and I could eat uncooked meat but our teeth aren’t sharp enough to break it down, and because of the bacteria it holds, it would give us stomach ache or perhaps poison us, which happened to me once but that’s another story.”

“Raw meat? Can you tell us that story now?” 

John Watson was standing in the doorway in his pyjama pants and a robe, which meant I could see tantalizing glimpses of his honey coloured belly, juxtaposed against the glimpses of his surprisingly neat toes. 

“Sorry? Did we wake you?” 

“Nope. Nightmare.” 

He made his way to the couch and sat with us. Albion stopped crying momentarily to see if John might do something interesting. 

“Why are you still awake?” he asked him in his special love voice, stroking the downy little head. 

“Not even I can work that out. So we’re having a story. The Colony of Cats.” 

“I heard.” ‘John surprised me yet again by quoting the story in an unexpected high voice. “ ‘Mew mew mew! In the well is fair Lupina! You have nothing but Pepina!’ ” 

“How do you know Colony of Cats?” 

“Everyone knows it. Harry had a book of it when we were little. I always liked the way the old cat put a gold star on the good girl’s forehead before he dipped her in a vat of ashes, and gave the bad girl a donkey’s tail” 

“I think those cats were needlessly judgmental.” 

“Well, cats are. They’ve got no patience for fools. Of course they wanted a good housekeeper. Cats make a lot of mess. And they had kittens in the house that obviously needed special care. What? Why are you looking at me like that?” 

I was indeed gaping. John Watson was surprising me at the rate of knots. 

“I didn’t know you had any views on this story, or on cats.” 

“You see, but you don’t observe,” he smirked. “I used to have a pet cat.” 

“When?” 

“When I was about twelve. Harry bought it home – I think someone at school gave it to her. Anyway, it didn’t like her. He spent all his time with me. I taught him to play marbles.” 

“What did you call it?” 

“George.” 

“Did you name him George, or was he already called George?” 

“I called him George, after the bloke who lived next door.” 

“Did you like the bloke next door?” I’m ashamed to say I felt a temporary pang of jealousy of the Watsons’ neighbour and possibly the junior Watson’s cat. 

“No. He was a complete prat. He kept two of my footballs when I accidently kicked them into his yard. You know the type. Hates everyone, always complaining. I thought it was funny that whenever we called the cat he’d think someone was calling him. He wasn’t amused, and called the council to complain. I don’t know what he thought the council would do.” John yawned and ran his hands over his hair. “Did you have a pet?”

“I had a dog. We used to go pirating together.” 

The secret Watson smile, the one he reserves for Albion and me, surfaced. “I like dogs. Wish we had room for one here.” 

“Well, maybe when his Lordship here is older.” I looked down to see Albion tasting the knuckles on his right hand. He’d been listening intently to John and me and was obviously reflecting on how lucky he was to have nice neighbours. 

John yawned again and made his way to the kitchen. “I’m going to make an early breakfast. I’m starving. You want something?” 

“Actually, a cup of tea would be nice.” 

He called to me from the kitchen while he clattered mugs and plates. “Is Mycroft back today?”

My brother had been busy patronizing security personnel in Washington for three days and was due home in the next twelve hours. 

“Shhh. Mentioning his name is like whistling the wind. I doubt it, he generally texts when he’s around.” 

We had our Mycroft -free breakfast together. Albion, who had been largely disinterested in his bottle, sat on my lap, holding his head up like a pro as he watched John eating cereal and stewed plums.

“What are you looking at?” John said, leaning in to kiss the little well-sucked fist. 

“You’re wondering what happened to the cats, aren’t you? Here, would you like some more of this positively scrumptious bottle?” 

“Actually…” John dipped his index fingers in the plums and held it out Albion’s mouth. “Try that.” 

This was, of course, Albion’s first experiment with human food, and the result couldn’t have been better than if I’d rigged it. After his first ever experience of real flavour, my baby bounced up and down and waved his little cocktail frankfurt arms in complete joy. 

“Ooo oo!” he said loudly, so John gave him another fingertip of plum. 

It was marvelous. I was so proud of him, not only liking the food but also recognizing the importance of trying something new. I lifted him high above my head and bought him in for a big kiss. “My majestic little piglet! Eating human food like a grown up!” 

In all, Albion had six Watson fingertips of plums. It’s possible he might have eaten more if his idiot father had thought to use the baby bowl and spoon he’d bought months before. 

***

We’d planned to spend the day buying the plethora of things needed so Albion could enter the fascinating world of food. 

“Mr Albion will need a high chair,” Anya advised when she started work. “You may choose to buy prepared baby foods in jars but I can make him some more nutritious foodstuffs here in your kitchen.” 

“What kinds of things were thinking?” I asked her. Albion’s diet was of enormous interest to me - I’d prepared a spreadsheet in anticipation of this happy day. It had been my initial plan to feed my son bland dairy foods first, and then introduce foods to him according to their colours. 

“On account of Mr Albion not owning his teeth yet, he should have pureed foods and custard.” 

“And it would be good if you kept the sugar to an absolute minimum – he’d be getting sufficient glucose on the formula,” the doctor added. 

Our views were not dissimilar. I wanted Albion to try as broad a range of foods of possible, and was certain that if I could puree it, Albion could eat it. My spreadsheet reflected this. 

John Watson prohibited me taking my spreadsheet on our shopping expedition, but this caused no grief on my part. I had a copy on my phone. 

It transpired that my spreadsheet was of no consequence, for Lestrade called us and invited us to Scotland Yard to look at some documents to pertaining to a very large shipment of narcotics. The high chair and jars of banana yoghurt were put on hold.


	45. Chapter 45

The import case was not particularly stimulating – I’d give it 6.3 on my how-interesting-is that-crime scale – but I was impressed by the sheer size of the operation. It involved three separate criminal gangs who had joined forces and rented warehouse space near the docklands area to store and distribute their product. 

They had left a very detailed indecipherable email trail, all in code and written in a complicated hybrid of French, English and Welsh. I can speak all three, so once I’d worked out how they were using the different languages, deducing what they were saying wasn’t very difficult. 

Some of the gang members had been arrested. Some, I deduced, had already fled the country, and one was currently being pursued around London. 

I had little interest in that part of proceedings, so we were back at Baker Street in time to relieve Anya of her shift. 

“Were you an exemplary baby today?” I asked my sleepy son as we walked through the door. 

“Mr Albion has been resting for most of the day. He had some custard for lunch, and I have made him some sauced apple for his supper.” 

“Is he keeping it down?” the doctor wanted to know. 

“Yes! He did not vomit for me at all.” 

I lifted my boy from his little nest of blankets and nuzzled his temple. “You are truly are quite exceptional, you know.” Albion grizzled his greeting and pushed his fat little paw against my lips. He likes to catch the words as soon as they come out of my mouth. 

(My baby is always splendid, but I find him especially lovely when he has just woken up. He smells like powder and damp cotton, and scowls with half opened eyes.)

John Watson leaned over to kiss Albion’s neck. 

“We might take you for a walk so you’ve got an appetite for dinner,” John suggested. And get some milk while we’re out.” 

“I have renewed the milk, “ Anya said as she reached for her handbag. “I hope you all have a beneficial walk and will be seeing you in the morning. Good night, Mr Albion.” 

*** 

We walked down to the park in the late afternoon light. Albion was strapped to me in his recently acquired baby sling, and John and I bumped hands. We weren’t one of those gregarious couples who chomped away at one another’s faces on the tube, but found subtle displays of public affection – like bumping hands - to be very satisfying. 

“I’m looking forward to the day when we can bring him down here and watch him run to the swings,” John said as we walked through the park. 

“We’ll have to chase all the other less entitled children away first.” 

“Well, we might have a dog then. We can get a loud yappy one that we can train to clear the playground for us.” 

My phone cheeped in my coat pocket, and John reached in behind Albion to fish it out. 

It was Lestrade. 

From John’s answers, I was able to work out that Lestrade and another detective, Sally Donovan, were at the warehouse, inspecting containers connected to the case we assisted on earlier in the day. 

“We’re down at the park with Albion. We’d have to bring him if we came. Yeah, not sure. Is it safe? Okay. Can you hang on? I’ll just ask Sherlock.” John held the phone away from his mouth. “Lestrade wants us to come and have a look at the containers.” 

“Have they arrested the last gang member?” 

“He didn’t say. But this is just to look at the containers.” 

“Why does he need us to look at containers?” 

“There’s more of those coded notes on some of them, apparently.” 

I consulted Albion for his views. “Do you want to come with John and I to a boring cold warehouse full of seized narcotics?” He swung his legs and cooed at me, which was clearly a delighted affirmative. 

“Tell him we’ll be there in fifteen minutes, traffic permitting.” 

 

*** 

We chatted about the case in the taxi. It was unusual, three gangs forming a conglomerate to execute a profitable crime like this. 

John thought it would be highly charged, testosterone soaked arrangement. “I bet there’s a lot of aggression and fighting behind the scene.”

“Possibly. But there’s a lot of money at stake. I think, if there’s fight, it would be about the final division of funds.” 

“It could be really friendly too. Maybe they all like working together. People are people, after all.” 

“Hmmm. I’ve never been a team player. Do you like working with people from other hospitals?” 

“Well, I have, when I was in Afghanistan. And with people from other countries who weren’t supportive of the occupying forces. The Medecin San Frontiers personnel were every where, and France was very opposed to the whole operation.” 

“But did you like it?” 

John shrugged. “I didn’t mind it. I can be a team player if I have to. But working as an army doctor is very different to working as a criminal. Or a consulting detective.” 

Albion made noises at us to remind us not to ignore him. 

“Yes, my little butterball, I know you’re there. Doctor Watson and I aren’t ignoring you. It’s just easier to talk to each other because we can, you know, actually speak.” 

The taxi approached a large modern warehouse, identical to every other large modern warehouse in Western Europe. 

John was unbuckling his seatbelt. “This is us, Sherlock.” 

We could see Lestrade and Sally Donovan standing outside one of the large barn like doors a few hundred feet away. 

“We’re going to meet a pretty lady,” I told Albion as I counted the fare into the tray. 

John looked at me quizzically. “Do you think she’s pretty?” 

“Sally? Not as pretty as you. But yes, definitely. And driven. Driven and cranky. Two irresistible qualities for any woman.” 

“I thought women weren’t you’re area.” 

“They aren’t. But I’m not blind. Do you think Sally’s pretty?” 

“I’ve never noticed,” John answered with a perfectly straight face. 

Sally Donovan, an enormously competent detective who often works in a team with Lestrade, has never liked me. A few years ago she couldn’t bring herself to even call me by name. She called me Freak, which I hated. Her attitude changed somewhat after I came back from the dead, but I hadn’t seen her for ages. I was hoping desperately that she wouldn’t call Albion any horrible names or hold him responsible for any flaws of mine. 

My fears were groundless. 

“Hello John, Sherlock … is that Albion? Show me!” 

Sally came around to stand by my side. Albion, who was strapped against my chest, peeped out from behind his fist. 

“Oh, hello, gorgeous boy! Aren’t you just exactly like your dad!” Sally tapped his little apple cheek and elicited a tiny shy smile. “He’s the living image of you, Sherlock! He’s just beautiful. Is he dressed like John on purpose?” 

The Doctor assumed his calm, military face. “He’s dressed like John because he has great dress sense.” 

“Of course. My mistake.” Sally made a mawkish wave with her hand. “Are you two…co-parenting?” 

John stood to attention. “Yes. Albion and I both care for Sherlock.”

It was brilliant timing and eased the slightly strained atmosphere considerably. Sally laughed and I flicked John a quick, raised eyebrow look. He nodded almost imperceptibly, thus agreeing with me that Sally is indeed very pretty. 

Lestrade was rounding us up. “Yeah, alright, I’m a firm advocate of the modern nuclear family but we’ve got ninety minutes before the security firm turns up to lock this place down.” He ushered inside the enormous warehouse and I calculated we were facing about one hundred and forty containers that formed twelve unevenly stacked rows. Instructions were written in thick marker on some of the containers using the same code I had seen earlier that day. 

It was hard to read because the light was poor. I asked my conductor of light to see if he could find the power box and illuminate the crime scene for us. 

While John wandered around in the near dark, Lestrade pulled out a pocket torch and threw a small white beam over the first row of containers. 

I could see the similarities immediately. “This is nearly identical to the coded notes I saw earlier today. The grammar is inconsistent, which means more than one person is leaving these instructions.” 

“What do the say?” 

“Well, as a rough translation – they’re indicating weights of whatever is inside and the amount of packages the container contains.” I studied the words more closely. “This container holds shipment of bags – suitcases, actually – and the packages are all in the lining.”

Small noises echoed through out the large warehouse. Rats thrive in places like this and quite often generations of rat relatives (and their nests) can be observed in corners, along the skirting boards and probably in the containers themselves. I assumed John was navigating a path through the rodents, looking for the light switches. 

“So you think the handwriting is by two different people?” Sally was taking photos on her phone and quickly punching in brief notes. 

“Definitely. This piece here” – I pointed a small collection of chubby letters – was written by a person who has English as their first language. This one” – I pointed the container stack on top – “is obviously written by a person whose primary language is French. Look at the way they’ve written the seven, and the accent on this e.” 

There were footsteps behind me, out of the blue, and a cruel, gravely voice addressed us. 

“Sherlock Holmes. Fancy seeing you here.” 

I turned around to face a tall, unwashed man carrying a baseball bat in one hand and a sawn off shotgun in the other. He looked vaguely familiar. 

“And Inspector Lestrade! If it isn’t my lucky day. Don’t know who you are, sweetheart,” he leered at Sally, “But I bet you’re from Scotland Yard too. What a bonus.” 

Albion chose that very moment to squeak. The man turned back to me instantly. 

“Is that a kid? Have you got a kid with you?” 

I had my arms wrapped around my son so tightly my biceps cramped. My mouth opened but I couldn’t make any words come out. 

The unwashed man laughed. “Do you know how many favours I would be owed in prison if I told every one how I killed your kid?” 

My bowels turned to scalding water. Albion squeaked again and then I remembered – John. I didn’t know where John was. A thousand images flashed through my brain – John with a depressed cranial fracture, slowly bleeding to death, John with a smashed up face, drowning in his own blood. My arms wound around Albion more tightly. 

“There’s no need for that,” Lestrade said in a surprisingly calm, reasonable voice. “Just put the weapons down.”

Mr Stinky laughed again. “Shut the fuck up! You’re all going to die. Junior first, then Sherlock fucking Homes, and then you pair of London’s finest.” 

He swung the baseball bat ever so slightly, sneering at me. “Hands up. All of you, Hands up.” 

I couldn’t. I heard the instructions, and understood what he wanted me to do, but my arms wouldn’t budge. 

“Listen, you poncy fuck, put your hands in the air or I’ll break both your arms NOW.” 

An odd sensation started to move through my chest, clamping my throat shut and squeezing the thin plate of muscles of my neck and jaw. Small prickles of sweat rose up my back; my legs were starting to shake. 

I couldn’t move and my reluctance to comply aggravated him further. He took a step towards me and Albion started his low grade wail, no doubt distressed by how tightly I held him. I wondered if I could get to the door, and tried desperately to calculate how far I’d have to run. My brain helpfully provided simultaneous memories of John Watson telling me how frequently he’d attended village homes that had been bombed, how frequently he’d rolled over a fatally wounded adult victim on their back, only to find a dead child helplessly and inadequately sheltered underneath. 

And then I heard the voice, John’s real voice, laced with fury and so, so reassuring on the cold black air of that warehouse as he stood behind this hideous man.

“You lay a hand on my family and I’ll grind your skull to powder with my boot after I’ve blown it off your neck. DROP YOUR WEAPONS NOW.” 

Mr Stinky jumped a little. He wasn’t expecting that. He regained his composure quickly and I strained my eyes to see John standing behind him. I was certain he wasn’t armed and my stupid brain started provided images of the many times I’d seen John draw his pistol. 

“On the ground!” I heard the Captain roar again. Mr Stinky dropped his bat first, then his rifle, and slowly got to his knees. It wasn’t fast enough for John, who planted his foot into the criminal’s back and sent him face first into the concrete floor. 

It was then I could see that John, the most courageous of any person I’ve ever known, was holding an empty bottle. John Watson had saved us all by pressing the mouth of a bottle against the base of the fugitive’s skull. 

 

Sally and Lestrade moved immediately. I heard the handcuffs clicking into place while I closed my eyes and breathed in the delicate scent of Albion’s hair, only looking up when I heard the large crystalline shatter of a bottle hitting the cold floor. It made us both jump.

John Watson was murderous in his rage, walking around to address the offender face to face. 

“Remember to write to me and tell me how many favours you get in prison when the other inmates learn you where bluffed by an empty Coke bottle.” 

Then he was on us immediately, his hand over Albion’s head and kissing his crown, his other on my shoulder. “It’s alright. It’s all over. We’re going now. Everything is all right. Are you okay? Sherlock? Okay?”

Something was wrong. I had a painful sickness that stretched from my gullet to my pubic bone. My skin was hot and damp, my hands shook, the lining of my mouth was dry as paper. It would be hours before I realised that for the first time in my life, I had been literally scared rigid. 

And Albion, precious cold, frightened and hungry Albion, launched a category nine wail on me for not having a boring, safe job like spot welding.


	46. Chapter 46

While I’ve built my career on careful examination and assessment of all available evidence at a crime scene, and brag whenever possible that I am the world’s only consulting detective, it must be said that Mycroft is by far more talented and skilled at deductions than I. 

He taught me everything I know. 

This is why, when he stood at my bathroom door that horrible evening, he knew he hadn’t caught John and me in the middle of some erotic sex game, but instead deduced immediately that John was doctoring, and that Albion and I were his patients. 

 

*** 

We’d caught a taxi home. I was relieved it was over, Albion was unhappy and unsettled. John was performing a cursory examination as my baby sat in my arms, making sure I hadn’t inadvertently caused him harm when I clasped him so tightly. 

“He’s fine.” John said over and over. 

I wasn’t. 

John ushered us both straight into the bath as soon as we got home. Mrs Hudson and Anya appeared from nowhere and there were small noises in the kitchen. Tea, I suspect, and maybe a light meal. 

Albion calmed down very quickly when we stepped into the warm water. John had squirted that water with some of the lavender baby bath fluid that we used. 

“Is that for my benefit or for his?” I asked as I drew my knees up and rested Albion against them. He had calmed down now we were home and was looking at me, smiling and cooing. 

“For all of us,” John smiled. “My main objective was to use it as a soap. And it smells nice. If it relaxes you, well, there’s a bonus.” 

John was gentle and precise as he leant over us, but the fury was still there. I could feel it, even as he smiled and spoke to us both in a soft voice, even as he swirled a washcloth through the water and stroked it over Albion. 

“There’s no marks on him, and he seems perfectly happy,” John assured me. 

I thought the same thing. “So he’s alright then, isn’t he?” 

“What happened?” Mycroft asked from the bathroom door. 

“Oh! Come in Mycroft.” John indicated the closed toilet lid. “Have a seat!” 

“Thank you, John. I’ll stand. What happened?” 

I was in no mood to revisit the ugly incident so relied on John to tell the story. 

My brother was immobile as the details were relayed, only lifting his eyebrows as John described the final moments. Mycroft was impressed by John’s bravery, and that’s saying something. He is utterly unmoved by just about everything. 

“Soft drink bottle? You disarmed this violent man with a soft drink bottle?”

“Worked a treat,” John answered. “Feels exactly the same as a gun muzzle, provided you can’t see it.”

Mycroft eyed my hero coolly. “Oh, Doctor Watson. You surely are a bad arsed motherfucker.” 

We both laughed, me because Mycroft only swears about every eight years and when he does it always sounds hilarious, and John because he was delighted to hear himself described this succinctly by a man who is so difficult to impress. 

(While three’s no doubt Mycroft was impressed by John’s bravery, he used this phrase entirely for my entertainment. His tireless campaign to ensure my contentment is an ongoing burden and blessing.) 

Albion was pleased to see we’d lightened up and joined in the laughter. 

Mycroft leaned over to tap Albion’s chin. “Oh, look at you, Detective Albion, all calm and carefree after your first hostage incident.” 

I shuddered inwardly on hearing “hostage”.

“It’s been a big day for him,” I said. “He had his first solids today too. Tell Uncle Mycroft what stewed plums taste like.” 

“Solids! You clever chap! We’ll have you tucking into a roast in no time.” 

I made a mental note to put some roast beef in the blender. 

Mycroft straightened up and looked me over. His face seemed placid but I knew he wasn’t pleased. “How are you feeling, Sherlock?” 

“I don’t honestly know.” This was the truth. I felt something huge and unyielding but had no idea what. 

“Well,” my brother asked with just a touch of impatience that only I could deduce, “Are you angry? Terrified? Agitated because taking a six month old infant to a crime scene was frankly a moronic idea?” 

“It wasn’t his fault,” John Watson said quickly. “I told you, Lestrade called us over while we were having a late afternoon walk. We had no reason to think there would be any danger.”

Mycroft ignored him and continued to address me. “I recall telling you not long after Albion’s birth that you’d have to be extremely careful about the kinds of cases you chose in the future. I didn‘t warn you not to take the baby with you to a crime scene because frankly I thought you’d have more sense.” 

“I had no idea…I would never put him in danger. It was unexpected.” 

“I hired you a nanny so you’d have expert care at your disposal whenever you needed to attend any case. It would have taken you just a few minutes to drop Albion in with Anya.” 

“She’d finished work for the day” – 

“She is paid to cover an on-call shift. She understood precisely the nature of her role when she took the job. You have no excuse.” 

John Watson wrung the washcloth quite deliberately and got to his feet. 

“Mycroft, Sherlock’s suffered enough. The whole thing was traumatic and quite unexpected. Shut up. If you must drag him through the bleeding obvious and make him feel worse than he already does, perhaps wait for a few days, yeah?” 

(I love John Watson when he’s like this. He plants both feet on the ground and folds his arms across his chest. It’s masterful.) 

Mycroft was unmoved and instead turned to me. “Are you in shock?” 

“I’m in something. I don’t know what.” 

“A deep tub of warm water and synthetic lavender scent, as far as I can tell.” Mycroft took a breath and stared at me until I looked up. I noticed then that his assistant, Anthea or whatever she’s calling herself this week, was leaning in the doorway, poking her mobile phone with her thumbs. 

Mrs Hudson and Anya then appeared at the door and politely edged their way in. Anthea hardly noticed them. 

“Sherlock, we’ve made you a little supper and a warm drink. Anya’s got a feed ready for Albion too. Isn’t it awful, Mr Holmes? Poor Sherlock! It’s just not safe anywhere anymore.” 

“Mrs Hudson agrees with me,” said Mycroft. 

The good lady wiped her hands on her apron. 

“No I don’t. He didn’t do anything wrong, just went to where the police sent him. It’s that awful man you should be telling off.” 

Mycroft put his nose in the air, the way he always does when someone objects to his pomposity. John Watson barely moved but stared straight at him, saying, “I told you so” with out uttering a word. 

Then Lestrade and Sally appeared. It was getting a little ridiculous. 

I addressed the room at large. “Am I having a bath party?” 

“Sherlock! Hello Mrs H. Anya. John, you hero. Mycroft.” Lestrade made his way through the crowd, stepped right up to the tub and peered down at me. Albion reached both chubby little fists up to him. 

“Hello, little fella! You feeling better now?” 

“He’s fine, Detective Inspector.” I lifted Albion slightly so he could touch Lestrade’s face. “Can we fit anyone else in here? Do any of you people understand how inappropriate it is for you all to be in here?” 

Not one person moved. Lestrade ignored me completely. “We’ve charged him, Sherlock. I’m going to have to take a statement from you because we’re going to lay a couple of menacing charges too, on account of him threatening the baby. Can you come down tomorrow?” 

“You couldn’t have texted this, Detective Inspector?” 

“I wanted to see that you were both alright. “

“Well, Sherlock,” Mycroft sneered, “I’m thrilled to see that your genius for attracting sympathy for problems you bring on yourself has not abated.” 

“It’s all changed, “ I said out of nowhere. It had suddenly occurred to me. Everything was different now. I had never felt fear before, and never held someone’s welfare to be so important. 

Albion stretched his arms out so I’d lift him up to rest under my chin. I was his number one choice for cuddles, entertainment and personal hygiene. He took that care and protection as read and I’d been unable to provide it. John Watson, though, had been able to step for me without hesitation. 

I had a completely different life. I had Albion, and we had John, smiling down at us, waiting with a bottle to ward off any threats. 

We were John’s family. That’s how he described us, and that was what had changed. John, the guarding angel, with both his wings unfolded and wrapped right around us. 

Mycroft broke my reverie. 

“I’d come here this evening to discuss some minor business with you but your circumstances render any such thing impossible. I’ll come back tomorrow morning at about 8am.” 

He pushed his way through the crowd without another word. 

Everyone stood there gawping. 

“Well, if any of you have ever wondered if I’m circumcised, you’ll find out in the next fifteen seconds when I get out of the bath.” 

The room cleared pretty quickly except for John, who of course knows.

 

*** 

I expected a full night of wailing, desperate fairy tales and nightmares from the two men in my life but my predictions were wholly inaccurate. 

After a bowl of baby custard and some low grade fussing, Albion dropped off to sleep just before 8pm. 

John and I lay on our bed, fingers loosely entwined and shoulder to shoulder, staring anywhere except at each other. 

“Mycroft’s up to something,” I said after a while. 

“What? How do you know?” 

“Well, he comes around most morning and never sets a time. This afternoon he said he’d be here tomorrow at 8am.” 

“Maybe he was set a time because … actually, you’re right. I don’t know why he’d do that.” 

“He was snippy too, more so than usual. He’s up to something.” 

We fell quiet again, thinking about Mycroft, until John chased him out of the room. 

“Are you feeling better?” 

I actually felt all right. I’m not one to dwell on how good or bad something might have been. This afternoon had been traumatic, but we were safe, and Albion was unharmed and sleeping soundly. In any case I had other things I wanted to discuss with John. 

“You said family.” 

John looked at me as if we’d only just met. “Sorry?” 

“This afternoon, you called us your family. You told that man” – 

“I know what I said.” John rolled over to face me. “Is that what’s bothering you?” 

“Not bothering. Perplexing. Is that who we are to you?” 

“Not Mycroft, no. But you, yes. Albion, yes. How does it perplex you? Do you want me to come up with another word? My Holmies, maybe?” 

I laughed. “No. It was strange, hearing you call us family. I never thought of Albion and I being anyone’s family.” 

“But you are, to Mycroft, your parents, and to me.” 

“Well, that’s what’s so perplexing. I’ve been thinking about it and yes, we are. We are, and I had no idea. Was it the first time you thought of us as your family, this afternoon?” 

John Watson came over all coy and gave me the very attractive smile he reserves for the times when he is being difficult. 

“Not telling.” 

We lay there smiling at one another while I worked out how to extract more information from him. The rage was still there – a rage in reaction to someone threatening what was his. I could still sense it, yet as I stroked his hand and pressed my thumb to his radial pulse, everything felt calm and composed. 

I ran my hands over the veins in his arms, looking for the rage. He responded by drawing me a little closer, inviting me into his warmth and mouth, bumping his body against me as he loosened my clothes. 

It felt different. John whispered to me, small, sweet things confirming that I was his and emphasising that no negotiations would be entered into. He kept one arm around me and if I moved slightly he pulled me closer, kissed me harder.

Then his whispers became explicit. “Open you legs for me, like that, yes, like that.” It was intoxicating; I’d never known him like this. That’s when I understood his rage, which once might have been subdued by crushing that skull with a coke bottle, was tonight channeled into dominating me and my fear. My perplexity, in turn was channeled into submitting to him. John and I were equals in all things – leading and following no longer played a part in our relationship - but we could indulge in private, and ease the anxieties that we’d both experienced. 

“Am I making you feel better, my love?” John eased fingers inside me, something he had done before but now he wasn’t hesitating. It was ownership and the confidence that comes with it. Yes, I could barely whisper, much better. Faster. Harder. The words were on my tongue, not forming as precisely as I wished, but he heard and pushed harder, then moved his mouth down to suck me while the pads of his fingers nudged my prostrate and little puffs of stars were there when I jammed my eyes shut. Fingers and mouth, it was like splashing petrol on a fire and then he stopped very suddenly and rose on his knees, kneeling over me, pushing his cock against my lips. Do me, do me now and as I sucked him I could hear him grunting, feel him turning and burying his face back in me, sucking me and timing it perfectly so that I came just seconds after him. 

A few years ago John and I would have exorcised our perplexity or rage with aggression; tonight we proved it could be alchemised into astonishing pleasure. 

I flopped over to lie on my stomach as I unwound and he lay close, still whispering. His rage had gone, and the room filled with the sibilance of his tender words while the heat of his body kept me warm. 

The perplexity was waning too, because I knew what it was now. It was having a son, and a partner, and working out not how they fitted in with me, but how I, who had lived in solitude all my life and prepared from a young age to die that way, fitted in with them.

 

While I sorted all this, John went to the bathroom and washed his hands, then took the stairs to Albion two at a time. 

He came back with Albion, sound asleep in his visiting basket. 

I knew before John spoke what he meant. 

“I want my family around me tonight.” John made a secure little bridge with two large chairs and rested the basket there. We curled up together with our son asleep nearby. 

John dropped off first. I thought I could lie all night and bask in the loveliness of the sounds of the tiny puffs from Albion, and the shallow soft snores from John, but next thing I knew it was five am and Albion was waking us both, reminding us that Mycroft would be here in three hours.


	47. Chapter 47

Everything changed for us after that day, at least in terms of our relationship. 

John and I are not men to whom frank and honest discussion about our feelings comes easily. In almost every instance, we’d much prefer not to discuss them at all. But that morning, we were closer and more settled, which was lucky because our biggest hurdle was waiting for us at 8 am.

Mycroft was punctual and carrying a sheath of papers. Anthea was one step behind him, completely absorbed in her mobile phone. 

“Ah, good. You’re both awake.” Mycroft was wearing his business face. “I trust you’ve all recovered from yesterday’s ordeal?” 

Albion made an interested cooing noise. John said, “Yes, I think we’re all bit better today.” 

“What business are we discussing, my dear brother?” (I was in phenomenal mood, or at least would be for another two minutes, until Mycroft ruined it.) “Be quick, Anya will be here any moment.” 

“I’ve already told Anya to wait a half an hour.” 

“Why?” 

“I’ll get straight to the point. Albion hasn’t had his birth certificate issued because you haven’t submitted the paperwork.” 

“What does it matter?” I was holding Albion, who had just started teaching himself to pull my hair. He was already very good at it. “He won’t need a birth certificate for at least four years, and that’s only if I decide to enrol him in school.”

“He has to go to school,” John Watson called from the kitchen. 

“I thought I might home school him.” 

Papa Watson was clearly wearing the pants in this family. “No. No home schooling. He needs to meet other children. And you mightn’t always be available to home school him. In any case, he has to get a birth certificate. He’s due to be vaccinated soon, and besides that, what if we want to travel? He’ll need a birth certificate to get a passport.” 

“Thank God for the voice of reason via Doctor Watson.“ Mycroft literally glowed with pleasure.

I know defeat when I see it. “Fine, I’ll fill out your dreary forms. Give them here.” 

Mycroft looked at the floor and took a deep breath. Obviously there was more. 

“What?” I asked him while my hair was being expertly pulled. (Albion has very little fists so could only grab a small portion of hair. He compensated for lack of volume with a strong, downward tug, which was extremely painful. His technique was flawless.) 

“You have two days to decide if you want to the court to issue a Parental Order.” 

I had no idea what that was and gave Mycroft a look to convey that. 

“The order means that Albion’s mother rescinds her right as a parent and the right is then transferred to your spouse or partner.” 

John walked from the kitchen. His face was unreadable. 

“And if I don’t do that?” 

“Adrienne remains his legally recognised parent, and if you change your mind in future, you have to organise adoption. Provided she agrees.”

This was obviously a minefield. I had no doubt my brother had been working on this for months.

“So an order is preferable. But wouldn’t Adrienne have to agree to that?” 

“Yes.” 

“And wouldn’t she have to sign the papers for that?” 

“It’s heard before a judge at the family court, then papers are signed. I can organise to have the matter listed for hearing tomorrow.” 

“But wouldn’t she have to agree to that?” 

Mycroft took another breath. “She already has.” 

“You’ve seen her?” 

“She’s in the car downstairs. If you agree, I can have her to sign the papers now, so the hearing - while still imperative – is more of a formality.” 

John was excited. I could feel it. “But hang on,” he said, “ Wouldn’t I have to sign as the person - you know, the new parent?” 

“Yes.” 

“Do we get an opportunity to discuss this?” John asked. 

“I had rather hoped to have you discuss it last night. Sherlock, as always, made that impossible. Adrienne is hoping to return to New York in he next twenty four hours.” 

I was inexplicably annoyed. “Why, has there been a new shipment of opiates?” 

Mycroft gave me an unpleasant look. “Improvement in the human condition is always possible, my treasured sibling. You of all people should know that.” 

“What, you’re telling me she isn’t using?” 

“You can see for your self if you want to meet with her.” 

I held Albion closer. “Does she want to see him?” 

Mycroft looked around the room, as if the intellectual stimulation he always hoped to find might float past any second. “I think it’s fair to say that her interest in Albion – or lack thereof –hasn’t altered from the last time you saw her.”

“Sherlock.” John had touch of urgency in his voice. 

“I don’t know how I feel about this, Mycroft. It ‘s very sudden. And John can’t be expected to make a decision of this magnitude after only a couple of months.” 

“Sherlock!” John tried again. 

“Why do I even need to see her? And has she admitted stealing that money? Does she want more? And how could she even have any rights to transfer? John Watson does more for Albion in thirty seconds than she did in the three days she knew him. She wouldn’t even hold him!” I was getting angry now. 

“Sherlock!” John Watson was in my face. Both Albion and I stood to attention. “I’d love to. I will sign now. I have no hesitation. You need to make up your mind if you want me as Albion’s parent. If not, it’s all fine. We can wait a couple of years and if it’s all still fine, I can apply to adopt him.” 

“What’s the point of the parental order if John can adopt later?” 

“A parental order means that with any important decision – like a passport, or vaccinations, or medical treatment - John can make that decision without you here. He becomes Albion’s legal parent. If you let this slip, Albion will have one parent. John will be, in common law, a guardian, but that status could be challenged in court. So if anything should happen to you – God forbid – Albion could be taken as a ward of the state, and stay that way until John’s role was defined by the court.” 

We both went quiet. Mycroft continued. 

“The order was legislated to allow parents who had a baby via surrogacy to actually parent. According to the legal definition, it could be argued that Albion is a surrogate baby.” 

Albion pulled my hair some more while I thought this through. I pretended Mycroft wasn’t there and turned to John. “Are you sure?” 

“We’ve known each other for years. I am absolutely willing if you are.” 

“Unequivocally.” 

Albion was determined not to be left out of this important decision and squawked loudly at both of us. 

“Well, he’s in,” John said. 

I turned to my brother, who once again had come to my rescue. “Bring her up.” 

*** 

To say Adrienne’s condition had improved was a gross understatement. 

She was wearing a navy blue suit (Valentino, I’m certain) and expensive Sergio Rossi boots. Her hair was cut neatly and styled softly over her face and was filled with caramel highlights. I wondered if perhaps she had been to Saks and made use of the stylists they have there. 

Clothes maketh the woman not, however. Adrienne looked better but she was still the same woman. 

She looked briefly at me, and briefly at John, and a little longer at Albion. 

“Is that the same one?” she asked, pointing.

She meant Albion. “Yes. This is Albion.” I wanted to ask her if she still had my lighter, but thought the better of it. John Watson does not approve of smoking. 

“He’s bigger than I remember.” 

“Would you like a cup of tea?” John asked in his nicest doctor voice. 

“No thanks. Are you the father?” 

Mycroft intervened before things got out of hand. “John will be the Albion’s other father, yes.”

“Oh, right.” She then looked around the flat, as if was vaguely familiar. I’d deleted how entirely uninterested she was in anything. 

We all sat down at the kitchen table except Anthea, who was still bothering her phone. 

“Sherlock,” Mycroft began, “I need to confirm that everything on this birth notice from the hospital is correct.” 

I looked at it, and John read over my shoulder. Albion was currently trying to pull his hair, which required a more advanced skill because it was so short.

“Albion John? Is that his full name?” 

I was a little embarrassed. “Yes. I meant to tell you. Actually thought I might amend it slightly.” 

“To just Albion?” 

“No. I thought Albion John Watson would be better.” 

It was worth suggesting just to see the look on his face. He smiled so widely I could see his back molars. 

“Well, John Watson is a boy’s name.” 

We both smiled at that. (It’s an old joke.)

“Albion John Watson Holmes. It sounds good, doesn’t it?” 

John smiled as he extracted a grabby little hand from his hair. “It does.”

Mycroft started dealing forms around. “Sign here. Sign here.” 

“Shouldn’t this be witnessed?”

“Yes. That is why I have Anthea here.” 

“Are you a justice of the peace?” I often wondered exactly what she was. 

She looked up as if under great personal sacrifice. “I’m a lawyer, actually.” 

“Really?” I had no idea. 

“Yes.” And then she looked down at her phone again. 

“She’s not witnessing much,” I said to Mycroft as I signed. 

“Anthea sees all.” 

Adrienne signed her name slowly in surprisingly neat, even letters. Mycroft hovered over her. 

“You do understand that you are handing over your rights as a parent to John Watson? That you will have no claim or rights over Albion at all, and that these orders are unlikely to be overturned by a judge?” 

“I already told you yes in New York,” Adrienne said, a touch irritated. 

I stared at Mycroft until he looked at me. “You were in New York? You said you were going to Washington.” 

“Washington is very close to New York. I must have got confused.” Mycroft gave me his most oleaginous smile. 

John Watson was most interested in Adrienne. I could feel his curiosity growing as he sorted through all the questions he wanted to ask. He settled on a gentle one to start. “So what kind of work are you doing?” 

“I’m going to have another baby.” She said this like she might announce when the next bus was due. 

Neither of us knew how to respond. It was too shocking. The more we thought about it, the more ludicrous it seemed. 

Mycroft waited until we were both completely confused and stepped in with all the relevant information. “Adrienne is preparing to act as a surrogate for another couple, a British couple who are currently living in New York.” 

“Oh!” John was very interested. “Another one?” 

“I’m going to have one a year until I’m forty,” she said, still entirely detached. 

“For couples?” 

“Yep.” 

“You’re okay with that? You don’t – you’re not worried you might want to keep one?” 

“Nope. Don’t like kids. Can I have a glass of water?”


	48. Chapter 48

Mycroft, true to his word, had our application listed the next day. Both John and I wore a suit; Albion was wearing his best cashmere jumper, a little pair of navy blue corduroy pants and smart teal socks. John even managed to comb his hair back. 

We all looked very respectable. 

I instructed Albion to make a very big fuss of John Watson so the judge wouldn’t hesitate to appoint him as his second parent. 

The matter was heard in a large room like a boardroom. Adrienne sat opposite us; Mycroft a few seats down at the end of the table. He was, he insisted, allowed to attend. My astute baby cried quite emphatically when the hearing started, and calmed only when John Watson took him and patted his back. 

The judge wore a robe but no wig, which I found disappointing. 

“Mr Holmes,” she began. “How old is Albion?” 

“Six months, three weeks and five days”. I remember it like it was yesterday. 

“And you were present at the birth?” 

“I was.” I wanted to add “not willingly” but bit my tongue just in time. 

“And Mr Watson?” 

“Doctor Watson.” 

“Of course. Apologies. Dr Watson. Were you at the birth too?” 

“No. I was travelling at the time.” 

“Tell me how you both came to the decision to have a baby.” 

I wasn’t sure whether to lie or to tell the awful truth. My brother looked away, which was his way of saying “you’re on your own, Sherlock.” 

“I didn’t. I didn’t know about the pregnancy until the day before. His mother came to my home and told me it was mine.” 

“”Oh! Oh.” The Judge shuffled her papers. “So you - actually, what did you do?” 

I explained to the Judge how I went to the hospital and was bullied into the birthing room, saw my little lovebug fresh from the womb and instantly fell in love. 

“I never hesitated,” I told Her Honour. “I loved him immediately and had every intention to be the best possible father from the moment I met him.” 

Albion chose that moment to burp very loudly. 

“Good boy,” I said proudly. “He is especially good at digesting,” I assured the judge. 

“Yes, clearly. Now, Dr Watson is your partner?” 

“Yes. He is my partner and my colleague and my best friend.” 

“Indeed. Dr Watson, if I may say so, I miss your blog enormously. Will you start it again?” 

“I intend to. Thank you, Judge.” 

She didn’t say anything about my blog, but again I bit my tongue. 

“Now, Mr Holmes, have you had much experience with babies?” 

“No. But who does, before they actually have one? In any case, friends and my brother have ably supported me. And there’s a wealth of information on the internet. And Albion is exceptional but no different from any other human, in that he needs to be fed and rested and kept clean. Also, he is extraordinarily gifted in communication. Just a couple of days ago he stared quite meaningfully at Doctor Watson’s breakfast to indicate to us that he was ready to eat solid foods. Some adults are unable to make their wishes so clear.”

“Yes. True. And Doctor Watson, do you have input to Albion’s care?” 

“Yes. Sherlock and I share the responsibility, and I act as his doctor too, although he is has wonderful health.” 

“Will he be vaccinated soon?”

“Yes. I’ll actually do it myself.” 

“Lovely. What a lucky boy. Now can you tell me, what kinds of things do you do with Albion? Mr Holmes?” 

“When?” I had no idea what she meant. Did she think we designed cities together? 

“Tell me about an average day in your household.” 

“Oh. Well, in the morning, John or I change him and he has breakfast with us. He likes a bottle and more recently, stewed plums. Then he has a bath and I dress him. He has a nanny, who lives downstairs, and she cares for him during the day and I generally work on cases, so I can visit whenever I want. When he’s a little older I will probably be out more, but only on weekdays. We have lunch together. The nanny finishes at four in the afternoon, and then we have a walk. Albion likes the park and is particularly keen to see birds and dogs. Sometimes I show him leaves and recently have been explaining photosynthesis to him. We have dinner when we return home. As I explained, he’s just started on solid foods. The nanny has made him some custards and bought some bottled foods but I’m not sure if he’ll eat the bottled food yet.” 

“Is he fussy?” 

“No. He has an excellent appetite and seems very amenable to try new foods. I hesitate to give him commercial foods because I’m not sure what’s in them. I’ll analyze them first and if I’m satisfied that there are no colours or synthetic flavours, then he can eat those occasionally.”

“Analyse them? Are you a dietician?” 

“No, I’m a chemist.” 

“You have a degree in Chemistry?” 

“First class honours in Natural Science and I did some post graduate research in pharmacology.” 

John Watson looked at me. He didn’t know about the pharmacology thing. 

“Well, you are eminently qualified to analyze baby food. So what is his routine in the evening?” 

“He has supper at about eight, and then sleeps for a couple of hours, then he likes to cry for most of the night.” 

“I see. What do you do?” 

“Well, John works shifts at St Barts, so mostly I attend to Albion at night. I let him cry, and tell him stories, which sometimes put him back to sleep. Sometimes John will take him if he’s awake.”

“You tell him stories?” 

“Yes. Albion likes stories about animals – particularly boars - and he likes stories with morals. Sometimes I incorporate him into the story, but only as a bystander or as a hero. Never with a gun or sword though.” 

“He listens to the stories?” 

“Of course! He loves them. I’ve told him stories since he was a few days old. I hope, by the time I introduce him to books in a few months time, that he will be familiar enough with the narrative to associate them with the pictures, and this should help him with recognizing words. “ 

The judge stared at me for a few moments. She had a toothache and her husband worked as a carpenter. 

“Well. Stories. Do you tell him stories, Doctor Watson?” 

“No, but sometimes I help Sherlock with his.” 

“Do you think Albion likes them?” 

“Yes. Sometimes he stops crying and listens. And he definitely has very advanced skills in both reacting to voices and forming sounds.” 

The judge looked at his both like we were crazy people. I made up my mind then to come back with Albion when he was reading Moliere in a couple of years’ time and illustrate the value of my plan. 

“So you are both committed to his parenting. I wish every child I met was cared for so lovingly. My congratulations to you both.” 

She turned to Adrienne. 

“Adrienne, are you prepared to rescind your rights as Albion’s parent to Doctor Watson?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Have you been forced in anyway to hand him over?” 

“No. I don’t want him. They can have him.” She said this politely, and not with malice. It was an honest statement but still I ached for my little boy, that his biological mother was unconcerned with his magnificence. 

“Was this a commercial arrangement?” 

“Huh?” 

“Was there a person who took money from you, or from Mr Holmes, to organise the pregnancy?” 

“No. Why would anyone do that?” 

“People do. Mr Holmes and Doctor Watson, did either or both of you offer Adrienne money to have Albion? 

John answered first. “I did not.” Albion was trying valiantly to grip his hair and was passed back to me. 

“No,” I said. “After Albion was born, I paid Adrienne a sum of money to compensate her for the time she was out of the work force, and to assist her with living expenses after the birth. There was no third party.” 

“What he said,” Adrienne confirmed. 

“Where did you meet Mr Holmes?” 

I froze. This could be awful, but Adrienne was a little more cluey than I thought. 

“Through friends.” Which was, of course, true, provided you didn’t examine it too closely. 

“So you underwent the insemination and pregnancy willingly?” 

“Yeah.” 

“What kind of work do you do?” 

“I have babies for people.” 

The judge cocked her head. This was going to be interesting. “Pardon?” 

“ I have babies for people. Some people can’t and, you know, it really gets them down. The lady I’m having one for now had depressions for a year and she’s so happy now. I’m going to get her husband’s jizz when I go back to New York. She said if they like the first one that they’d have a second.” 

There was silence for a second or two as we all dealt with jizz. The judge continued.

“What did you do before you had babies?” 

“I worked at Superdrug for a bit in Lewisham. Had a job in a carwash for a bit, and worked at a factory where we packed biscuits. Then I was unemployed for a long time.” 

“Did you have plans for a job?” 

Adrienne shook her head. “I’m stupid. I can’t do anything. I was stupid at school and I was rubbish at Superdrug. And then I had a baby and he was so happy. Look at them.” She jerked her head at John at me. “I saw this thing in Glamour about this girl who had a baby for her cousin, and I thought, I may as well see if I can do it for other people, and then I saw this thing on Craigslist so I went to New York. And, well, I just want to have babies for people who can’t. I may as well. And it’s good, you know? I don’t want a baby but the New York people sent me to one of them gynothingies and he said I was fertile and real healthy and could have a dozen babies. So I’m going to.” She looked around the room, as if there was no one there. “It’s good, you know? I’ve never done anything important.” 

It was sad, but John smiled at her and said, “Well, you’ve made up for lost time.” 

Albion then noticed the judge for the first time and leaned over to see if he could reach her hair. She tapped his hand with her index finger. 

“Yes, we’re talking about you, young man! You’ve been such a good boy, haven’t you?” 

My son wasn’t ready to address the court and turned back to me, hiding his face in my neck and making do with my hair. 

The judge looked back to Adrienne and continued. “You’ve had police warnings for drug use.” 

“Yeah. I used to use drugs. I don’t any more.” 

“Have you had counseling? 

“Nope. I just have stuff to do now.” 

“I’m going to ask you one final time, for the record – are you certain you want to give up your rights as Albion’s parent?” 

“Yeah.” Adrienne was looking over the judge’s shoulder at the clock on the wall.

“And Doctor Watson, you understand that if I grant this order, you will be, in the eyes of the law, Albion’s legal parent?” 

John grinned. “Yes, I do.” 

The judge looked down at her file. 

She made a few cursory marks on the file, and then looked up to record her decision. “I am granting a parental order to Doctor John Watson, who will, from this moment, be recognised as Albion’s parent in accordance with the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Parental Orders) Regulations 2010. Adrienne, this means you are recognised as Albion’s biological mother but you can have no say in his upbringing and are unlikely to be recognised in a court of law in Great Britain as having rights of a parent unless some aspect of Albion’s care is in jeopardy. To have this order overturned is extremely difficult. Do you understand?” 

Adrienne stared at her blankly. “Yeah. Does that make the blonde one his mother?” 

The judge was wondering how Adrienne and I ever managed to make a baby. John Watson was wondering the same thing. 

“Doctor Watson is now Albion’s legal parent. You are not. Do you understand?” 

Adrienne smiled. “Yeah! Good one!” 

On cue, Albion started crying and stretching his arms out to John, no doubt furious at me for taking so long to provide him with a parent who adored him as much as I did. 

***

It was very exciting. John and I were almost giddy when we came out of the Judge’s chambers. 

“Well,” said Mycroft. “The happy family.” 

“Can I go now?” Adrienne asked. I would say she was even more bored now than she was in hearing, but that wasn’t possible. 

Mycroft rolled his eyes. He was bored too. “Yes, of course. I’ll have my car take you to the airport.” 

John, Albion and I faced her, and John extended his hand. “Thank you. For everything. I wish you all the best with – well, with the next babies.” 

“Yeah. Okay.” 

“You can come back and see him whenever you like.” 

“No. Okay, bye.” 

And off she went in the black car. 

“Such a lovely day,” Mycroft said, staring at the low clouds over London. “I do believe I’ll walk back to my office.” 

“Why don’t you join us for lunch?” I asked, only because I could feel John insisting that I did. 

Mycroft leaned in and kissed Albion, who made a quick dash for his hair. 

“Oh, I’d love to, but I really can’t. Best wishes to you both.” And to Albion, who just wasn’t quick enough to grab Mycroft’s hair, “Goodbye my sweet. Enjoy your new legal status.”

He went to walk away but John reached out and grabbed his sleeve, which was enormously entertaining because people rarely touch Mycroft and he’s never sure what to do when they do.

“Mycroft. Thank you. Seriously. Thank you very much.” 

“My pleasure, John. Only the best for my family.” 

And my brother strolled off, tapping his umbrella delicately on the pavement in time with his steps, no doubt smiling as he plotted the downfall of some despotic Government in a third world country. 

“Does he have a sword in that thing?” John asked. 

“He used to. I think he replaced it with a small thermonuclear device.” 

We watched him walk away and there we were, a proper little family. 

“I’m starving!” John Watson declared. Albion was resting on his shoulders, thinking about whose hair he might grab next. “Let’s go somewhere to celebrate!” 

I knew just the place. 

***

“Sherlock! It’s been so long!” Angelo called to me as we walked into his restaurant. “And John! And oh my God, who’s this?” 

“This is my – our son, Albion.”

“Oh! Oh my God! He’s the living of you! Marina, come and see Sherlock’s baby!” 

Angelo’s wife, Marina, his kitchen staff and the wait staff all gathered around us. Albion studied them all and assessed whose hair he would like to pull most. 

John and I used to eat at Angelo’s all the time, back in the days before I died. Because I once helped Angelo avoid an (unwarranted) conviction, he now makes a tremendous fuss of us. I liked coming here because he used to insist John was my date, much to John’s annoyance. Also, he makes a cabonara that should be awarded a Nobel Prize. 

Angelo fussed around the table near the window. 

“Here, your table is free! Let me open some wine for you. What a wonderful family you have! I will personally make a meal for the bambino. Baby spaghetti! 

John Watson smiled at me across the table and when Angelo poured the wine, we clinked glasses across the table. 

I felt like we are had finally arrived at the right place, and finished the journey we started this very table all those years ago. 

But there’s always something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gentle readers: The British parenting laws are complex and best left in the hands of far more astute people than me and when I say astute I mean lawyers. The Acts and regulations to which I make reference in this chapter are enacted a little differently to how they are described here. I had to weigh up whether it would be preferable to adhere to the last syllable of the law or prevent you all from slipping into a legal coma, which can of course be fatal. 
> 
> I chose the latter. My apologies to any person with delicate legal sensibilities who feels blighted by my actions.


	49. Chapter 49

Albion, exhausted by a day of hair pulling and legal procedures, once more slept soundly. I was having happy (and deluded, it would transpire) thoughts that he was starting to sleep the entire night through.

John was not so lucky. He woke up agitated and fearful at 2.12, damp and wide eyed in the grip of a nightmare. 

I deduced it had involved Ollie, which was unsurprising, given John’s new role in Albion’s life and the endless discussions of parenting over the last twenty-four hours. John’s subconscious must have been sodden with his feelings and grief for Ollie. 

“John? Are you okay?” I was inching over behind him and working out how I could slip my arms around him without disturbing him. 

He sat upright, leant forward and waited until his thick, frightened breaths subsided. “Sorry that I woke you,” he said as he slipped back down onto his pillow and turned his back to me. 

His nightmares embarrass him. It’s the only time he is out of control and genuinely frightened. In a strange way I feel very privileged that he trusts me to witness this weakness. 

“Is there anything I can do?” 

“No.” He reached out for my arm and pulled it over his chest, locked it into place with his hands. 

“Would you like me to tell you a story?” 

“Absolutely not.” 

“Once upon a time there was a handsome Prince who was quite smart but in essence an absolute idiot. He was born with a big brain but no one could find his heart.” 

“Is this a story?” 

I thought it would help John to have a distraction. In any case, I had some important things I wanted to tell him and thought this would be a good way to do that. “It might be. Listen and find out.” 

“Is it a story about you?” 

“Yes. But actually, no. It’s a story about you.” 

“Am I the Prince?” 

“No.” 

“Does the Prince have a name?” 

I hadn’t thought of a name. “Guilliuame”, I said quickly. 

“Is he French?” 

“No. Do you want to hear the story or not?” 

“I really don’t.” 

“Good. Now shut up. The young Prince was raised by two well-meaning but very tedious people. They spent all their time telling the Prince that it didn’t matter if he didn’t have a heart and that that he wasn’t as smart as his brother. So the Prince decided that if he truly wanted to make up for the fact that he didn’t have a heart, he would need to be very smart indeed.” 

“Did you say the Prince had a brother?” 

“Yes, unfortunately,” and here John Watson blessed me with his ridiculous little giggle. “The Prince had a brother called Michel who was a complete plonker and wanted nothing more than to rule the world.” 

“This doesn’t sound like it has a happy ending.” 

“Oh, you’d be surprised. Shut up and listen. The Prince loved puzzles and loved working things out. His mother, who had been a very talented mathematician before she was lumbered with babies, taught him to do sums at a very early age, and taught him how to find the answer by eliminating the false.”

“Oh! So the Prince liked to deduce things. Did he want to become a consulting detective?” 

“No. He wanted to be a pirate and travel around the world and pillage information from every corner of the globe and solve great mysteries.”

“That’s weird.”

“That’s what everyone said but the Prince paid no attention and planned to become a very smart pirate who could solve anything. Alas, the education system let him down badly and he ended up having to go to Cambridge and study Chemistry, which was a pity in a lot of ways because he had no idea what to do if he couldn’t be a pirate.” 

“Why did he go to Cambridge?” 

“Because his mother and father went there and he was too bigger idiot to break out on his own. So he went to Cambridge and continued the patterns he had established as child – no friends and being an insufferable swot who got all his assignments in on time. No wonder all the kids hated him.” 

“Didn’t he have any friends?” 

“Not one.” 

“He must have been lonely,” John said with a kind, sad voice. 

“He didn’t realise he was lonely. He didn’t have a heart. He thought everyone was born without a heart and that they experienced things the same way he did. He couldn’t work out why they all went to parties and regattas and balls.” 

“This is not a very uplifting story.” 

“It gets better. Although obviously it gets a lot worse first. Shut up. So the Prince went to university and graduated very well and then thought he’d do some post graduate work, partly because he had no idea what to do but mostly because he had a terrible crush on another post grad student from his college.” 

I felt John’s curiousity piquing. “Oh! Did he find his heart? 

“No. It’s probably safe to say that he had, however, made a fairly close connection with his penis.”

“He was a late bloomer.” 

“Yes. But in his defence, he was reading Camus while his pubescent schoolmates were marveling over their pubic hair. Shut up. Now the Prince followed the grad student” - 

“What was her name?” 

I took a deep breath. “His name was Victor.” 

“Oooh! Was it just! Why haven’t I heard about Victor?” 

“I’m telling you now. Shut up. The Prince made up some ludicrous hypothesis about studying the properties of saponification with a view to creating synthetic fats that would produce very concentrated commercial soaps and at the same time followed Victor around, hoping he might notice him.” 

“Did Victor notice him?” 

“He did, but he thought the Prince was a bit of a joke and just led him on until he got bored.” 

“Did the Prince consummate their relationship?” 

“Yes, but the Prince wasn’t particularly skilled in the area. The internet hadn’t been invented then so the Prince didn’t have the opportunity to work out what he should be doing. It was all a miserable failure, and the Prince left University and went to live in London, where he stayed with his big brother.” 

“Actually, the internet was invented in 1969.” 

“Shut up. We’re at big brother’s house now.”

“Well, that should have been fun for the Prince.” 

“Not really. The big brother got the Prince a job in the CSL, in the National Bee Unit.” 

“Seriously? There’s a National Bee Unit?”

“Yes, of course there’s National Bee Unit. Bees are an intrinsically important part of the food chain and ecology. The Bee Unit did an enormous amount of research centred around insecticides so the Prince did some very basic analysis work.” 

“Did he like that?” 

“Well, he didn’t get to actually handle any bees, which was disappointing, but the lab was across the road from a Magistrate’s Court so when it was quiet, the Prince used to go and sit in on the criminal court listings. Because he was good at deducing, he became very good at working out if a person was guilty or not.” 

“So did he become a consulting detective then?”

“No, I’ve already told you, he was an idiot. He still hadn’t entirely given up on being a pirate. Anyway, he worked in the labs for a couple of years and then he met another chemist on whom who he developed a very bad crush, and it was like the Victor situation except worse, because the Chemist was married and led the Prince on in a very unacceptable way.” 

“This is a miserable story.” 

“It gets better. Shut up. Anyway, the Chemist got a transfer to Aberdeen and the Prince kept having these private, tortuous crushes on totally unsuitable men, all the time thinking he was so rubbish at having relationships because he had no heart and because he wasn’t as smart as his brother. Then he met a man called Val who turned out to be a recreational heroin user and he got the Prince interested in chemical stimulation. Which was a good thing, because the Prince got to meet a lot of people and had some friends for a while, but a bad thing because the Prince decided he liked being high better than anything.” 

John tightened his grip on my arm. “So what happened?” 

“The Prince used a lot of drugs, got fired from his job and became a hopeless junkie.” 

“What did Michel the heartless brother think of this?” 

“He was exasperated and went around with his usual ‘who farted’ face, but didn’t say anything until the Prince overdosed and ended up in St Bart’s having his heart and respiratory system kick started with electricity. Which was something.” 

“Seriously, unless this story starts getting better I really don’t want to hear any more.” 

“Shut up. Of course you do. Anyway, the Prince’s tedious parents both went mental and came to see the Prince and cried and asked what they had done wrong and why was he such a rubbish son and why couldn’t he be like his brother and that went on for days until the Prince discharged himself and got a job in a bottle shop.” 

“Seriously?” 

“Yes. And it was here that the Prince started to do the things he always wanted to do.” 

“Be a pirate?” 

“Yes. Not with a boat mind, but he worked out that he was able to pillage all the information he wanted from behind the counter. He watched people who came into the shop and took notes about everything. He opened every brand of cigarette and taught himself the difference between the different types of ashes.   
He studied all the customers’ clothes and the way the way the handed over the money and how they spoke to each other and he got very good at deducing.” 

“So did he become a consulting detective?” 

“Are you telling this story? No you are not. Shut up. One night masked men held up the shop while the Prince was in the store by himself. The owner found the Prince the next morning, still tied up and quite cranky. The owner called the police and a Detective Gilroy Lestrade was the investigating officer.” 

“I always wondered how you met,” John said thoughtfully. “And his name is Greg.” 

“Shut up. The Prince gave the Detective all kinds of information, which led to the arrest of all three assailants. And the Detective came back two nights later to ask the Prince’s opinion about something else. And so on.” 

“So that was the start of a beautiful relationship?” 

“No. That was the start of the Prince understanding how woeful the police are at gathering evidence and solving crimes. But it was the start of the Prince learning how to be a consulting detective.” 

“So then what happened?” 

“All kinds of boring things. Nothing interesting, except the Prince got busted for using drugs on the Northern line tube and while he was being bailed, Gilroy turned up and told the Prince that he couldn’t ask his opinion on crimes if he was a junky, and if he’d go to rehab Gilroy would let Prince go to some crime scenes. That was acceptable, and eventually Gilroy called him to a murder, which the Prince solved in four hours. And so the Prince kept solving murders and was deliriously happy and only using drugs when he was bored. He wheedled his way into the labs at St Bart’s with his brother’s help and had access to the sophisticated lab equipment there. He got a nice flat by himself on Montague Street and lived there for four years until the landlord died and his son, who was having an affair with three married women, kicked the Prince out.” 

“Did the Prince tell the women about each other? “

“Well, yes. Shut up. After he was kicked out, the Prince ran into a woman he had helped in Florida and she offered him rooms in her house around the corner in Baker Street. The Prince was very excited but sad at the same time because he was lonely and he couldn’t work out why, given he didn’t have a heart. Anyway, he moved all his boxes and his violin and his lab equipment to Baker Street. 

“Did the Prince like not having a heart?” 

“Sort of. It made it very easy to be a consulting detective. Anyway, one day Gilroy rang him up and told him about a murder where the body had specks of dried green paint on it. So the Prince went over to Bart’s to do some tests on paint and blood, and got talking to the Lab manager, and told him that he had a new flat and the lab manager asked if he was living alone and the Prince said, who’d want a flat mate like me? The lab manager just shrugged his shoulders and went out to lunch.” 

I could feel John smiling. “Then what happened?” 

“Well, the lab manager came back from lunch with a Woodsman, who was apparently an old friend of his.” 

All of John Watson’s muscles grew quite tense. “WHAT?” What the hell is a Woodsman?” 

“A hunter. Usually associated with the Regent.” 

“A Woodsman?” 

“Yes, precisely. A Woodsman, like the man who took Snow White out into the woods but let her free, and killed a boar to fool the wicked stepmother. A loyal man, a kind man, an intensely good man.” I drew John a little closer. “The Woodsman came in and looked around, and the Prince suddenly felt this strange knocking in his chest, which he ignored because he was an idiot. He deduced that the Woodsman was looking for a flat, so the Prince asked him if he wanted to share his. And he did.” 

“Did the Prince like him?” 

“Oh, yes. He liked him enormously. He thought he was brave and smart and unlike anyone he had ever met, and he wanted to be friends with the Woodsman forever. Anyway, the Prince solved the green paint murder and was then chasing a serial killer who tried to poison him, and the Woodsman killed him with a single shot over 100 metres through two windows.” 

“Is that the end?”

“No. Shut up. The Prince lived with the Woodsman and they had the most wonderful times together. The Prince was still an idiot but the Woodsman was so patient, and he liked all the trouble the Prince got into and generally they had a marvelous time, until they met another Prince who was very evil and tried to kill them both.” 

John’s body grew tense again. “I hate the evil Prince.” 

“Every one did, especially the idiot Prince. The evil Prince heard the knocking in the idiot Prince’s chest and worked out what it was.” 

“What was it?” 

“It was his heart, which he never knew was there until he met the Woodsman. And the evil Prince threatened to burn it out.”

John was silent. He knew this part very well. 

“So eventually, in order to save the Woodsman, the Prince had to pretend he died so he could go off in secret and eliminate every trace of the evil Prince. It took two years and the Woodsman was sad.” 

“The Woodsman was catatonic,” said John. 

“Yes. But the Prince was still an idiot and didn’t realise why. While he was away he thought about the Woodsman everyday and made plans for all the wonderful things they could do when he returned. But the Woodsman moved on. He met a pretty lady. When the Prince came back he was too late, because the Woodsman was going to marry the pretty lady and the Woodsman was going to be her husband. The Prince realised that he – the Prince - was an even bigger idiot than he originally thought.”

 

“This is a long story.” 

“Well, you wanted to hear it. Shut up. Anyway, the Woodsman got married and at the wedding the Prince realised that his heart would never knock so loudly for anyone again, and all he could do was be grateful to the Woodsman for helping him discover his heart. And the Woodsman went off to be with the pretty lady.” 

John went silent again. 

“But the pretty lady turned out to be a bad person. She lied to everyone, shot the Prince twice and betrayed the Woodsman in the most awful way possible. She had a baby but “_ 

“I don’t want to hear that part,” John said quietly. 

“Okay.” I pulled him a little closer and kissed his hair. “So after the pretty lady was arrested, the Prince, who she shot again, went to hospital and the Woodsman gave up on everything and walked around the world. The Prince was heartbroken. He rushed out, still with his stitches in, looking for drugs and apparently had sex with a strange kind of fairy who ended up having a baby, which she didn’t want and who the Prince adored. But he was only able to adore the baby because the Woodsman had taught him where his heart was, and how much love it could hold.” 

“And did the Woodsman come back?” 

“Of course he did. And he loved the baby too. And the Prince could not have been happier. And all he wanted was the Woodsman to be as happy, so one night, he gathered the Woodsman up close and said, if you want to have a baby, we could find the fairy and engage her services to make you a baby too. Not to replace Ollie, but to make up a little for pain of losing her.”

I could feel John straightening in my arms, his chest expanding, his shoulders straightening. 

“Having a baby costs a lot of money.” 

“Yes, but the Prince has a lot of money, because he was paid very well when he went away to hunt the evil Prince. Also, one of his batty aunts left him and his hideous brother some money about fifteen years ago. The older brother can access it for him.” 

“The flat isn’t big enough for two babies.” 

“You can always make room. The older brother has great influence with the London councils. Everyone in London builds up.”

John was quiet for a long time. 

“How would the story end, if there was another baby, do you think?” 

“Happily ever after. Obviously.”


	50. Chapter 50

And that’s my story. 

My son is now four. He’s sitting on the floor playing his favourite game with John and I. We’ve have upended a full bucket of wooden bricks and have built three tall towers. 

The game is called Godzilla, and the purpose is to build towers with blocks and have Godzilla walk right through them and knock them down. 

Godzilla doesn’t disappoint. It’s her favourite game. Her she comes now, twenty-seven inches of baby girl in a pink onesie and a blonde topknot, Bonnie Jean Sherlock Holmes Watson, storming through the coloured blocks, squealing at her brother and father and straight into my arms. 

“Oh! Godzilla! Not again!” we all say. 

My children are splendid.

Albion’s quiet, thoughtful, inordinately fond of toy cars, story books, custard and animals and endlessly patient with his baby sister, who has just in the last couple weeks started to call him Abeen. 

My son looks like me – dark hair, blue eyes, knobbly knees - but is not so like me in temperament. He’s gentle, has an adorable lisp, natural kindness, and reminds both Mycroft and I of his grandfather, who he adores. 

Bonnie is a delight to us all. She likes stories, smearing her face with jam, hearing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the violin and stomping all over whatever her big brother is doing. She’s cheerful and outgoing, a happy, content little girl who has, with her tiny hands and little squeals of laugher, smoothed all the jagged scars on John’s heart. He hasn’t had a nightmare since she was born. 

Our daughter has some similarities to her mother, mingled with John’s fair hair, clear blue eyes and slim wide smile. Sometimes when he is holding her they’ll both look at me at the same time and my heart twists in my chest. 

My partner, my best friend, my doctor, my John, is the sun around which we revolve. He wipes noses, mops up spilt drinks, stares at me with patient resolve when I’m being ridiculous and with these quiet, unassuming practicalities, keeps us all safe. I owe him so much every day, this wonderful man who not only found my heart but thought it worth keeping. 

 

We are, despite my indignant protestations, not dissimilar to every other young family in London. We juggle out family with our jobs. The chaos of lost socks and breakfast and sibling spats is soothed only by John’s common sense and Anya’s unerring service as a splendid nanny. John and I still take cases; he still works at the hospital three days a week, and we both work hard to ensure that our weekends are our time with each other and with our children. 

We plan, when Albion and Bonnie are older, to go back to cases full time. If we feel like it. 

*** 

It had never been my intention to have a partner, much less a family, but I’d never counted on finding my heart.

Children aren’t easy to raise, relationships are relentless hard work, but the delight they cause me outweighs every disadvantage - John when he reaches out for me in his sleep, Bonnie when she stops in the park to show me a flower or Albion, when he comes home from Preschool with another impossible-to-decipher painting that he made just for us. (A couple of weeks ago his teacher told the class to paint something blue and red: my brilliant boy painted Doctor Watson in scrubs, holding a liver with the artery still attached. I’ve had it framed.) 

Nothing could have prepared me for the fear children cause you. Not just the large, typical fears of sickness and tragedy, but the small unavoidable fears that they’ll have friends, that they’ll get chosen for games at parties, that their tiny, tender feelings won’t be wounded. Two of the greatest reliefs I’ve known is the realisation that my boy isn’t bothered by an onslaught of continual harsh thought like I was, and that already he has little friends at school and in the park. He can make friends. I hope he won’t ever know loneliness like I did. 

And Bonnie – well, who knows? She’s already displaying signs of an extroverted personality, but there is no way to guess what kinds of things are waiting for her in the future playgrounds and classrooms. All we can do, I’ve learnt, is love her fiercely and accept, despite all I was taught, that caring is an advantage. 

There are so many things you want to teach your children, but so many things you can’t. It is awful to realise that some things they have to learn will come with grief or discomfort or pain. John and I have known so much of these things and it hurts us both to know that no matter how desperately we love Albion and Bonnie, there are no happily ever afters as popular culture will have you believe.

The trick, I think, is learning that you have to make your own happiness, and you make happiness to fit your life and circumstances. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, some bursts of happiness will appear out of the blue. I trying to instill this my boy as gently as I can, and it is something that I think is resonating with him. 

A few nights ago we gathered for the bedtime story, which John or I will read, but of late Albion is able to tell the story and can make out one or two words. This night he chose Snow White. 

“This was my favourite when I was baby,” he told his sister, who was sitting in my lap. Albion sat in John’s lap, turning the pages carefully and explaining the story to Bonnie, who was rapt. She finds everything he does marvelous, but nothing so much as reading a story. 

“Don’t be fwightened,” he told his sister when he explained boars. “If there’s a boar and it comes here, Mrs Hudson will hit with her bwoom. If she misses, Daddy and other Daddy will kill it before it can get us.” 

“I think we’d probably take it to the zoo,” John suggested. 

“After we’d conducted some experiments,” I added. 

When he was almost at the end of the story, Albion looked up from the book and smiled excitedly at me, as if something wonderful had just occurred to him. 

“So what happened?” I asked. I thought that Snow White and the Prince were about to be trampled by dinosaurs, which happens with alarming regularity in the stories Albion tells. 

But my little boy, who kept my heart beating after the Woodsman found it, smiled and me and turned back to his sister, who more recently taught me just how far love can make a heart expand. 

“They had a house and had chores and went to the park and had messes but lived happily ever after,” he smiled. “Like us.”


End file.
